How to Get the Best Emoji on Your Android Phone
Android phones might not display the latest emoji. Here's how to improve emoji game on Android systems. Emoji are great, they can't act as a substitute to language; instead, they add to it, making it richer, colorful and adding the tone missing from online text with multivariate symbols. They're also frequently changing, as the Unicode consortium keeps adding new images—wrestlers, a dumpling!—to the mix.
The keyboard with emoji for android may not be automatically exploited, as several Android mobile phones do not support the latest emoji symbols. This may implies that when emoji are been sent from an iOS to an Android phone, all that can be seen is little squares or nothing at all. These tips will help you get the best Android emoji you can.
For Very Old Android Phones
It requires an operating system update to drive new Android emoji. For a very old Android phone, whose version is of the earlier ones than 4.1, it would be very impossible to display any emoji at all. In order to enable the use emoji for texting on one of this kind of device, a third-party keyboard app must be installed and using Hangouts as texting app. Hangouts renders its own emoji.
In situations whereby text is being ignored, bear in mind that Facebook and WhatsApp parade their own emoji sets. There's no way to render emoji in a browser or email on an Android phone this old.
To switch texting app to Hangouts:
- Go into Hangouts on phone
- click on the menu button (three lines) on the left-hand side of the screen
- Select Settings > SMS
- Turn On SMS
- Once it's on, go back to home screen.
- Click and hold on the texting app at the bottom of the screen
- Drag it up to where "Remove" appears and then open the app drawer
- Click and hold on the Hangouts icon, and drag it to where the texting app was.
Then, texts can be sent with emoji.
To send emoji, it’s also requiring to download and install an emoji-compatible keyboard from the Google Play Store. SwiftKey and Gboard are good ones. To activate it;
- Go to Settings > Language and Input
- Click the check box next to SwiftKey or Gboard
- Then tap on Default to set it to your default keyboard
Getting Android Emoji on Newer Phones
Newer versions of Android support emoji, but might not support all of the emoji an iPhone-owner can see. That's because emoji is been included with system upgrades, and Android phone makers have a bad habit of not upgrading their software.
If emoji can’t be seen on your keyboard, it’s necessary to turn them on.
- Go to Settings > Language and Input (it depends on the device, there should be room to either tap Keyboard or pick the Google Keyboard directly)
- Go into Preferences (or Advanced) and turn the emoji option on. There should now be a smiley (emoji) button near the space bar on the Android keyboard. Or, just download and activate Swiftkey.
For texting, the best way to get the latest emoji is to download the app Textra and replace it with the texting app (in the same way as explained with Hangouts.) Textra not only has all of the latest emoji, it has optional add-ons which will show emoji in the iOS style.
Bunches of "emoji keyboard" apps can be seen in the Play Store, feel free to play with them, but understand that they won't affect how emoji are displayed on phone, just how they are been input.
Third-Party Emoji Keyboards
Downloading a third-party keyboard is a solid option for Android users if its quantity been searched for; for example, the Kika Keyboard Emoji Keyboard app gives access to more than 3,000 emojis. In addition to offering numerous of options to select from, the app includes an emoji prediction feature along with an emoji dictionary, in case the meaning of an icon isn’t understood. GIFs and stickers can be sent across social apps like Facebook Messenger, Kik, Snapchat and Instagram. While the app is free to download, themes are available for purchase.
This article won't delve into the specific third-party emoji keyboard apps since most of them are quite similar to Kika's offering. If interested in downloading one to get even more emojis than the standard Android keyboard offering, it could definitely be worth spending some time browsing the options in the Google Play app store.