Every year, the chant gets louder:

oh that’s cool Apple that you added all this stuff but WHERE IS MY EMOJI SEARCH

This year, people are going to have to come up with a new request, because emoji search is coming to iOS 14.

So what the heck took Apple so long?

Emoji search seems so obvious, did Apple just forget to implement it? Did they not know people wanted this?

Here I piece together the most likely reasons this took so long. It’s probably not just one, but a bit of each of them.

(Oh, and if you’re new to my rarely-update-blog here, you can usually find me over at Emojipedia.)

1. 🗓 Timing 

The emoji keyboard first came to the iPhone twelve years ago in iPhone OS 2.2.

It took until 2011 for widespread access to this keyboard in iOS, and wasn’t until 2016 that it became clear that frequent emoji updates may be a real thing.

In the early years, there wasn’t much change in the emoji set. iOS 8.3 in 2015 nearly doubled the set, and by the following year it was clear that updates were coming consistently year-on-year.

This isn’t much of an excuse so much as to reframe our minds. It feels like emojis have been huge and growing in number forever but we’re talking more likely 4-5 years here.

2. 🙅 Apple just isn’t good at search

Search isn’t Apple’s forte. Siri and App Store search come to mind as examples that you just don’t have faith when you say or type a phrase, that you’ll get a great result.

You might, but you wouldn’t want to bet your life on it.

It seems reasonable that Apple knows its strengths, and has avoided doing emoji search until it could do a decent job. 

Apple has emoji search on the Mac. It’s existed for years. And it has gotten worse over time.

Something happened in 2016 which caused the previously inflexible-yet-consistent emoji search to broaden and accept more terms, but with far less pleasing results.

The good news? Emoji search in macOS Big Sur has improved. It’s also decent in iOS 14 beta.

It felt like in 2016-2019, Apple’s macOS emoji search was either too complex and buggy to fix, and now replaced. Or it has finally been improved.

Whether these tweaks are implemented by hand (by checking the most common search phrases and fixing accordingly), or by natural language processing improvements, I’m not sure.

3. 🔡 Emoji Auto-Suggest

Apple has had emoji auto-suggest for a number of years on iOS. 

You start typing a word, and an emoji might be suggested in the list of options. This works relatively well for a small set of results. 

Issues with auto-suggest-as-emoji-search:

• If you’re already on the emoji keyboard and can’t find an emoji, you need to get back out of the emoji keyboard to try auto-suggest
• Only three results are shown at a time. If you have a big group of results like all green emojis, three isn’t enough
• If you don’t like the auto-suggest options you have to delete the word you just typed. Or you end up with a random word in your text.

Was emoji auto-suggest intended as the solution, so emoji search wasn’t needed at all? Did this delay the search feature? Maybe, but not necessarily.

Perhaps it was just a good place to get some data on what people are emoji searching for.

4. 😳 Public shaming

The first version of emoji auto-suggest on iOS only suggested one emoji. Damon Beres at Mashable noted the issue this presented, when searching for some terms.

Why should CEO show a man and not a woman?

Having only one auto-suggest option was always short-sighted, as it’s lose-lose no matter which gender is shown.

Apple rectified this in a subsequent release, by showing up to three choices.

Given the public and media interest in emoji, I doubt Apple wanted to roll out emoji search on iOS that was either buggy (ala Mac emoji search until now) or suggested bias (like the CEO auto-suggest option used to).

It’s one thing having bad search results on a relatively hidden feature on the Mac. It’s another to have them on a marquee feature of iOS.

Thankfully the emoji search results on iOS 14 beta are decent. Though they don’t make a particular point of which gender is shown first - it varies considerably, with no specific logic that is clear.

One failing here: you cannot press-and-hold any search result emoji to choose a different skin tone. The same limitation applies to the emoji auto-suggest feature.

5. UI Weirdness

One minor issue that may have deterred Apple from implementing emoji search earlier: it’s sometimes weird having a keyboard shown on screen that doesn’t actually type into your app.

If you accidentally find your way into the emoji search field, there is a new button in the lower-right hand corner to escape back to regular text entry. Or just tap where you want to type.

This same issue exists with third-party keyboards and iMessage apps like any GIF search. It seemed weirder at first, but now I think most users are familiar with a search-within-keyboard option.

As far as I can tell, there is no option to turn the emoji bar off.

Final notes

This is beta software, so I’m not going to review the specific functionality, but my initial notes are:

• ✅ Emoji search on iOS seems good, shows what an average user would expect.
• 💻 Compared to Catalina, the Big Sur results are much better. Every issue I raise in this earlier article has been addressed. A general test of other terms seems to show results that are universally better.
• 🤷 Sometimes the same search shows different results, I don’t know why
• 🔄 The search results are different to emoji auto-suggest. Typing ‘woman’ suggests 👩 in the auto-suggest bar, but gives a whole bunch of types of women in the search results, well ahead of the base ‘woman’ emoji.
• 🇬🇧 I performed my tests in English. I’m not sure how the iPhone emoji search performs in other languages.

Are you running iOS 14 beta and have you noticed any major emoji search issues? I’d be interested to know.

As far as I can tell, what Apple has implemented so far with iOS emoji search passes the ‘good enough to not notice anything special going on’ test.