Introduction

Everyone uses emoji to provide emotional cues for interpreting typed conversations or even replace words or phrases. They appear to be images, but they’re actually a standardized list of Unicode characters sent as plain text. A viewing device renders the appropriate image in its own font, so the actual displayed image might be different or unknown on different operating systems. Because emoji are text, they adjust to match the surrounding text’s size, color, etc.

Genmoji is Apple’s new AI tool that allows users to generate emoji-like images by typing prompts like “cat with a halo and forked tail”. You might have used similar tools in ChatGPT or Instagram. Unlike emoji, Genmoji are images — unique, rasterized bitmaps. They can’t be described by Unicode text characters, and they display exactly the same on every Apple device.

Before iOS 18.2, users couldn’t enter images alongside (inline with) text. When you attached a sticker to a message, it didn’t appear inline with the message text. To type emoji into your text, you tap a button to switch to the emoji keyboard, then search or scroll to find the one you want. The emoji keyboard for the iOS 18 Messages app adds the user’s personalized content — Stickers, Memoji, Animoji, and Genmoji — and a Genmoji button.

Note: Apple’s collective term custom emoji includes Stickers, Memoji, Animoji, and Genmoji. These are all images, not Unicode. This module uses the term Genmoji as shorthand for all these sticker-type images.

If your app has a text input view that supports custom emoji, its keyboard lets your users enter custom emoji alongside text, and your app should display it like an emoji, including adjusting it to match the text’s attributes.

To help you do this, you use Apple’s new [NS]AdaptiveImageGlyph API with [NS]AttributedString (and NSMutableAttributedString) to support rich text in your app.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this lesson:

• Explain how Genmoji and emoji are different.
• Explain how Genmoji can be used alongside text.
• Understand key features of NSAdaptiveImageGlyph and AdaptiveImageGlyph.