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I search smilies / emoticons for my Android App. I found that there are some open source sets available like used by pidgin.

But I was wondering about the emoticons used in Whatsapp. They are basically very nice. Thus I thought that they are licensed by whatsapp. Now I have installed the messanger "telegram" and I was suprised. They are using the same emoticons than in whatsapp. How can this work out? Are the emoticons publicly available?

tobias
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Both Whatsapp and Telegram (and a lot of other messenger apps, browsers and operating systems) use the Emoji sets.

The different types of Emoji are a result of different fonts for emoticons; they have a different appearance depending on the "font" used but the base is always a unicode set of characters.

Both Whatsapp and Telegram use the Apple implementation apparently, as Ivo's link specifies. Also see this github for more licensing info.

Kablam
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  • does this mean, that I can use them if I provide the license informaiton in my code? – gco Nov 25 '15 at 12:53
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I don't think they are actual of Whatsapp put part of an actual Font.

I don't know if anyone can see it but for example on this wikipage I can see all emoticons like they are on whatsapp, and they are actual symbols in unicode and not images. EDIT: I can only see them on my iMac (Apple)

This website says they are actual licensed by Apple if I understand correctly (note 2)

Kablam
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Ivo
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WhatsApp and Telegram both use a font that has been made by Apple. Apple doesn't license this font, so what they are doing is actually illegal, although Apple apparently doesn't care.

jobukkit
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