Why iPhones are much better for emojis than Android (AAPL, GOOG, GOOGL)

One example: the latest batch of emojis, including critical icons like the avocado, fingers crossing, and the shrugging person, were added to iPhones in late 2016 thanks to a series of software updates.

And when an iPhone user sends them to most Android users, they see blank boxes instead of colorful emojis.

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The reason why there's an emoji gap between iPhone users and Android users is because Apple is great at getting its users to upgrade to the latest version of its software.

Unicode, the organization that approves new emojis, has been creating new emoji on an annual basis recently. Google and Apple rapidly integrate the new emojis into their software, but Apple users actually download the new software, giving them the new emojis.

Android vendors, like Samsung or LG, aren't as quick as Apple is to upgrade to the latest version of Android. In fact, according to Google's own statistics, less than 1% of Android devices are running version 7.0 or higher — the version with the new avocado emoji.

Compare that to Apple, which has 84% of its users using iOS 10 or higher. The vast majority of iPhone users are seeing the new emojis.

It's gotten so bad that some popular Android apps, like WhatsApp, are hardcoding in emoji support into their apps, instead of simply using the built-in operating system support. Burge says this approach "

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