2016-09-11 14:40 GMT+02:00 Christoph Päper <christoph.pae...@crissov.de>:
> Mark Davis ☕️ <m...@macchiato.com>: > > > > I haven’t been able to find out what constitutes a “major vendor”. > Apple, Microsoft and Google are certainly ones (and Unicode Full Members), > but what about, for instance, Samsung, LG, Sony, They are vendors yes, but for hardware devices using common platforms (Windows and Android most often, or derived directly from Android). The hardware capabilities of devices made by them are mostly the same as the ycompete at the same time on the same global market with similar features. The good question however is how they support these devices for the long term: sales of new mobile devices are slowing down, as more and more people feel that they are too much expensive and there's now a life to maintain devices functional, and there's now a vivid secondary market for repairing or upgrading them, or changing their batteries instead of buying a new device (additionally now people already have a secondary phone, possibly older, but that can be used as backup when necessary). > Twitter/Twemoji, Facebook, Whatsapp or widely-used platform-independent > ones like Emojione (mostly Associate Members or not Unicode members at all)? > These are connected wep apps, and web apps have no difficulties to support and upgrade their supporting fonts or collections of icons. Users don't need to upgrade, this occurs almost transparently. If these are mobile apps, they are updated extremely frequently from their publication store (Windows Store, Google Play, Apple Store), using simple procedures (however mobile apps tend to grow in size at each update, forcing users to select which one they'll keep, or forcing them to uninstall one to install another one, then switch back, if they have old models with low storage capacity: 8GB smartphones are now deprecating in factor of 16GB ones, but these app vendors should propose several versions of their apps for users with limited storage, and they forget to monitor the market to see that this growth of app sizes is becoming a problem, when many features are added but not used by users. Most resident features should better be installed on demand in a cache that will clean up automatically if storage becomes too low; ideally most apps should be online and should use minimal local code). Beside these vendors, there remain some niche markets for mobile devices that have their own OS not compatible and not supported by these wellknown apps vendors. But most of them are created based on a Linux core (just like Android itself), and use wellknown platforms (Java, .Net, or simply the HTML/CSS support of the builtin browser) and apps are not complicate to port. The real complication is in the default support for input interfaces (i.e. virtual keyboards) that these apps need, and adaptaing them for the local markets (languages). Emoji input however is mostly independant and can be developped and supported across languages in the same input panels. The necessary sets of fonts or icons may also be instaleld transparently using web queries and the standard browser cache. These should be mostly independant of the target app platform or OS. vendors may develop their own common subsets (with personalized style), but there will be plenty of alternative offers (just like there's a lot of providers since long for emoticons, long before many of them where encoded). I don't think this is a major problem. However the complexity now is not in the encoding of emojis but the recent development of complex encodings requiring now large ligature tables to work properly, and/or using variant selectors. The most common combinations should be better documented in the standard (it is possible to encode them in the list of "named sequences", or in a separate list specifically for emojis). But I wonder if this is productive to show all styles for emojis: why not returning to just display a single representative glyph, with basic "flat" designs, but probably with some colors to help distinguishing them: but which version from which vendor should the standard use for that glyph ?. Emoji doc pages and reports in the Unicode site tend to become very large and it becomes much harder now to initiale new sets for designing new styles. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook can develop their own sets, just like there are standard sets from Japanese telcos.
