Apple first released Apple Color Emoji for which mobile OS in 2008?

Apple first released Apple Color Emoji for the iPhone OS in 2008.

The first Apple Color Emoji release arrived with iPhone OS 2.2 in November 2008. It contained 471 emoji glyphs and was initially limited to iPhones sold in Japan. Apple later removed that regional restriction, helping emoji become a familiar part of the iPhone experience worldwide.

This debut came before emoji had been fully standardized across modern platforms. Early Japanese implementations drew on carrier emoji traditions, including SoftBank’s designs, while Unicode later incorporated emoji characters in Unicode 6.0, released in 2010. That timing creates a common mix-up: Apple’s emoji support predates Unicode’s first emoji-focused release.

The operating system was renamed iOS in 2010, so “iPhone OS” is the historically correct name for the 2008 release. Android, BlackBerry OS, and Windows Mobile were competing mobile platforms, but they were not the platform named in this Apple launch milestone.