The messaging application known as Whatsapp has grown to become one of the most widely used methods of messaging for smartphone users over the years. As of today, it boasts of a network of over more than 250 million users across the globe. One of the things that make updating status on Whatsapp unique is its personalized set of smileys and emoticons. These emoticons add a certain charm to conversations and make emotions easier to convey in a digital age.
Whatsapp emoticons are unfortunately unavailable on iPhones. The standard smileys and stickers that Android users currently enjoy on Whatsapp are not yet compatible with iPhone, so for users to be able to enjoy emoticons, they would have to use their emoji keyboards that work on iOS.
Emoji was originally a Japanese term that refers to pictures used to express tone instead of a set of characters made to look like people expressing feelings or actions. Instead of using several characters that ate up the usable amount of letters and symbols you can place in a message, Japanese-based engineers made it possible to send a small picture at the expense of only one character.
It started out with just a few smiles and symbols when it began, but now, users are able to convey a very wide spectrum of emotions such as anger, stress, and even a plea for help using the many pictographs available on an emoji-compatible device.
In 1999, Japan encountered a large problem with the growing amount of mobile phone users frequently preferring to send pictures instead of text messages to convey their messages. This was a very costly alternative because the size of a picture file may be equivalent to several hundred text messages put together. With that much data sent to and from networks, the cost and load of such messages put a large challenge for Japanese mobile phone companies. They would have ended up bankrupt with the immense amount of pictures sent on a daily basis. Internet speeds would go down and constant delays would have occurred if a solution was not found.
In order to solve this problem, Japanese engineers created small pictographs that could be treated as single character inputs from users. This was a good solution to the problem as it encouraged text messaging and allowed for lighter bandwidth usage. This was the birth of emoji. The name “emoji” itself means “picture character” when translated to English.
The connection between emoji and the iPhone came later on when Steve Jobs was trying to market the device into the Japanese market. He was met with plenty of rejection because iPhones were a bit behind on picture sending through messages, unlike Japanese service providers.
It was through the telecom company known as Softbank that the technology behind emoji was incorporated into the iPhone. In exchange for a sizeable cut from iPhone profits in Japan, Softbank partnered with Apple to provide full support for an emoji keyboard. With that, every iPhone user was given access to Whatsapp emoticons. With the full support for emoji, which was a staple for many Japanese mobile phone users, Apple was able to penetrate the Japanese market.
Today, emoji support is now found not just in iPhones but in Android as well. On top of being able to support Whatsapp emoticons, Android users can also change their keyboards to use emoji and send emoticons to other devices that are compatible.
Using that technology, any application that uses a keyboard will come along with the capacity to send and receive emoji icons. It has now become a popular input method on iOS devices around the world.
Fortunately, iPhones have been built to support emoji keyboards automatically and they already come pre-installed on later versions of the smartphone. In order to activate the emoji keyboard and all the icons that come along with it, you just simply need to go to the settings option. Under settings, select the “General” option. This menu provides you with various options that change the presets an iPhone has such as the date and time. Under “General”, you will find an option that says “keyboard”. That option will show all the available keyboards installed into the device. Emoji should be one of the options found there. Once you have selected and added this under the same page, the iPhone will now display a different keyboard when the need arises.
When this is done, the emoji keyboard will pop up within Whatsapp, giving users full access to all the smileys and other icons available through the keyboard and because Android and iOS phones are all compatible with emoji, the recipients of these smileys and emoticons will not have any trouble recognizing the characters.
Tapping the globe icon on the emoji keyboard will pull up a list of the available pictures for sending. Users can cycle through various categories such as time, people, flora and fauna, punctuation marks, and even vehicles. As of today, there is roughly more than 1500 available emoji icons.
When updates for iOS became available to users, more and more emoji icons are made available in order to provide more tone to messaging services. This means that constant and prompt updating of the software is necessary to ensure that bugs and error messages do not interrupt full usage.
Another way to use Whatsapp emoticons on an iPhone is by installing other third-party emoticon add-ons for Whatsapp. A trip through the iTunes store will provide you with many options. The only problem with using extensions like these is that other iPhone users may not be able to see and appreciate these emoticons because they might not have the same extension installed on their handsets.
With newer updates of both Whatsapp and iOS, users can expect to gain access to more Whatsapp emoticons in the future. On top of that, users can also expect a change incompatibility between the iPhone and Whatsapp. They may be able to use actual Whatsapp emoticons without the help of emoji sometime in the future.
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