Keith Broni, writing at Emojipedia, has a good illustrated survey of how most emoji sets have converged in meaning — almost entirely toward Apple’s designs:

There are several structural reasons why Apple’s designs so often become the gravitational center of emoji convergence.

First, Apple is widely regarded as the “default” emoji design set in the West. This status dates back to 2008, when Apple introduced emoji support on the iPhone years before emoji were formally incorporated into Unicode.

It’s also the case that Apple’s emoji icons are the best, and they’re the most consistent. The only ones Apple has changed the meaning of are ones where the Unicode Consortium has changed or clarified the standard description. The pistol emoji is the exception that proves the rule. Apple, and Apple alone, changed its pistol emoji (🔫) from a realistic firearm to a green plastic squirt gun in 2016. By 2018, all the other major emoji sets had changed their pistols from firearms to plastic toys — almost all of them green squirt guns in particular. (Broni’s post documents this progression year by year.)

One thing that remains interesting to me is that Apple left its emoji style alone when they instituted the great flattening with iOS 7. Apple’s emoji icons are, loosely, in the style of Apple’s application and toolbar icon designs from the Aqua era. People love emoji, and at this point, changing their style to something that felt aligned with the icon designs for Apple’s version 26 OSes would generate outrage. But if Apple were to change its icon style back to this rich 3D textured style, the majority of users wouldn’t object — they’d think it was fun.

Basically, Apple’s emoji style is fun. Apple’s icon style is no-fun. People like having fun.

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Matt Richman, back in 2012:

In 2009, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007 and 2008 combined. In 2010, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007, 2008, and 2009 combined. Last year, Apple sold 93.1 million iPhones, slightly more than it did in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 combined. The pattern continued.

I referenced this old post earlier today, attempting to put into context Meta’s “leak” that they’ve got concepts of a plan to ramp Meta Glasses production up to 20 million units per year. It’s easy to forget — or if you’re young enough, to just accept as history — just how astonishing the growth of the iPhone was in its early years. Every year wasn’t just bigger than the previous year — it was bigger than all previous years combined. Year after year. That pattern only ended after Apple had run out of new countries, new carriers, and new customers to introduce it to.

There’s never been a product like it before, and quite possibly never will be again. In January 2007 no one had ever even seen a device like an iPhone. By 2015 or so, almost everyone in the world who could afford one either had an iPhone or they had an Android phone that looked and worked like an iPhone.