Consider upgrading EmojiOne

[evoL]

Description

Currently Riot doesn't support new emoji added in Unicode 10 and above. That's because it depends on EmojiOne 2, which is not supported anymore. Since EmojiOne support even Unicode 11 in version 4 and new emojis are being more and more widespread, I believe it would be nice to upgrade.

Unfortunately, according to my short research, it's not as easy as just bumping the version in package.lock. EmojiOne 3 was a breaking change and it might be necessary to adapt the code and ensure everything still works. Apart from that, version 3 and above are released under a different license. It would be worth checking if the new terms are OK.

In any case, I think this would be beneficial for the users of Riot, especially because there is a growing discrepancy between emoji support in OSs and what Riot supports. (I found one issue about that already: #6522)

Version information

• Platform: web

For the web app:

• Browser: all
• OS: all
• URL: riot.im/develop

[dbkr]

Unfortunately emojione 3 also has a different license, so we can't use in Riot I'm afraid. There are alternatives though.

[evoL]

Fair enough, I was kind of expecting this. I just had a quick look at their free license page and two points stand out there:

• May not include icons in open source projects

• May not use assets as primary component of your digital application

Now, I feel both points are kind of arguable in case of Riot (Is an entry package.json considered including? Are emoji a primary component of Riot?), but I agree it's better to stay on the safe side, since it's not Creative Commons anymore.

Speaking of alternatives, two of the big players release their emoji set under a fitting license, Google (Apache 2.0) and Twitter (CC-BY 4.0). Combined with a dataset like iamcal/emoji-data (MIT-licensed), it would be possible to replicate what EmojiOne gives out of the box.

[sandys]

is there an update on this ? Google's Noto Emoji seems like the best option here - https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/emoji/

[Half-Shot]

I'm very sad that @mvgorcum 's 🤮 didn't render properly in riot, could we look for alternatives as a matter of priority :(

[turt2live]

We're taking out emojione (#9281) for various reasons (see comments). Closing this because we don't have plans to upgrade emojione. In future, we may reconsider and use one of the lovely alternatives proposed here though!

[evoL]

Fair enough. I buy the maintenance cost argument. Thanks for the update :)

I'd just like to somewhat reiterate the point of #9281 (comment) — please at least keep a lookup table for shortcodes (:smile:) and emoticons (:)) to emojis.
It doesn't have to be EmojiOne's, but may be a different, preferably up-to-date one (like the one from https://github.com/iamcal/emoji-data). This is a very useful feature no matter whether you use custom emojis or not.

[turt2live]

I believe the plan is to do that - @evoL posting that link on #9281 would help make sure it doesn't get lost though :)