Which organization maintains the Unicode Standard used to encode emoji?

The Unicode Consortium maintains the Unicode Standard used to encode emoji.

The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit organization that coordinates the development of Unicode, a universal character-encoding system. Its work allows text and symbols to be represented consistently across operating systems, websites, apps, and devices.

Emoji proposals are evaluated through the consortium’s process, while the Emoji Subcommittee handles much of the specialist review and documentation. The consortium standardizes code points, names, properties, and sequences; it does not draw one mandatory picture for every platform.

That separation is why an emoji can look different on Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Samsung devices while retaining the same underlying encoding. The World Wide Web Consortium develops web standards, and ISO publishes international standards, but neither is the organization that maintains Unicode itself.