On Apple devices, there are several ways to express a feeling when we are chatting such as Emojis, Memojis, Animojis, or Memoji Stickers. The terms are very similar, but they refer to quite different elements. Let’s clarify the differences and what we can do with each of them.
What are the differences between Emoji, Animoji, Memoji, and Memoji Sticker?
Emojis
Emojis are small icons that represent a feeling. The term “emoji” comes from Japanese, it is the union between “e” which means drawing and “moji” which means character. Emoji is a character drawing.
The arrival of new emojis to our devices is a two-step process. First, there is the Unicode Consortium responsible for the Unicode standard to encode characters. This organization creates the descriptions of the emoji, for example “radiant face with smiling eyes”, and assigns them the code “U+1F601”. Periodically this consortium publishes the updated list of emoji icons.
In a second place, we find the different companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Emojipedia, Twitter, Samsung, etc. These companies create, starting from the Unicode description, a graphical representation of an emoji by maintaining the concept.
We can use emoji in any text, in fact it is just another character that each system will interpret in its own way.
Animojis
To properly understand the Animoji we have to go back to the launch of the iPhone X. This was the first iPhone to replace the Home button with Touch ID with a camera system and Face ID. To identify us and unlock our iPhone it creates a three-dimensional map of our face to subsequently recognize us.
The Animoji live inside the Messages app, we access them through the monkey-shaped button that appears above the keyboard. They are basically characters, such as the bear, the shark, the cat, the dog, the panda, the dinosaur, etc.
Thanks to the True Depth camera that the iPhone X and later have, these Animojis mimic our facial expressions. We can send them as a video by tapping the red button to start recording or drag them into the conversation to send them as an image.
Animoji images and videos are generated on our device and sent in such a way that anyone we send them to will see them just as we do.
Memojis
We can define Memoji as an Animoji with our face. Instead of using one of the default characters we can customize a human face with all its features (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair, etc.) to make it a representation of ourselves.
Once we have customized this Memoji we can use it just like any other Animoji.
Memoji Stickers or Animojis
Stickers are small images that we can “stick” in conversations to express ideas. Stickers are generated from the Animoji characters that come by default plus all the Memoji characters that we create and show different emotions or actions such as surprise, approval, dream, greeting, etc.
We can use the Stickers from the Emoji keyboard, we will find them on the left side of the selector, next to the most used Emoji.
As with Memoji or Animoji, our device generates the image so that we can send it through any messaging app besides iMessage, such as Telegram or even email. It will always look exactly as we see it.
