Apple added an emoji keyboard to iPhone OS 2.2 in Japan in 2008.
The release helped make emoji easier to enter on the iPhone for Japanese users. At the time, emoji were already established in Japan through mobile-phone carriers and services, so supporting them addressed an important local communication habit.
The keyboard was initially associated with the Japanese market rather than being a universal iPhone feature. Users elsewhere later found ways to enable it, and Apple eventually made emoji input broadly available. This expansion helped push emoji from a primarily Japanese mobile convention into global mainstream communication.
The date is sometimes confused with later worldwide adoption. Unicode 6.0 standardized emoji in 2010, and many platform releases expanded their emoji support afterward. Apple’s 2008 keyboard was therefore an important distribution milestone, not the invention or global standardization of emoji.