alt Hacker NewsThe number of unicode processing bugs that existed (and maybe some still exist) alone is reason to be a bit cautious.
And having emojis work "mostly" but not "everywhere" would have been something Jobs would have entirely been against - if they wouldn't work over normal non-iMessage SMS, for example, or not work reliably.
Remember the "emojigate" issues where the same emoji would display differently on different phones and make a funny message seem threatening, etc?
I thought it was weird when they made the gun emoji look like a toy.. to make threats seem funny? Or some sort of Sapir-Whorf thing? I don't know, it never made sense.