Is there a way to know if an Emoji is supported in iOS?

Question

I\'m building an iOS App, and Emojis play a big part in it.

In iOS 10.2, new emojis were released.

I\'m pretty sure that if someone has iOS 8, for example, t

Answer 1

Just for future reference, after discovering my app had 13.2 emojis not supported in 12.x versions, I used the answer from here: How can I determine if a specific emoji character can be rendered by an iOS device? which worked really well for me.

Answer 2

Clarification: an Emoji is merely a character in the Unicode Character space, so the present solution works for all characters, not just Emoji.

Synopsis

To know if a Unicode character (including an Emoji) is available on a given device or OS, run the unicodeAvailable() method below.

It works by comparing a given character image against a known undefined Unicode character U+1FFF.

unicodeAvailable(), a Character extension

private static let refUnicodeSize: CGFloat = 8
private static let refUnicodePng =
    Character("\u{1fff}").png(ofSize: Character.refUnicodeSize)

func unicodeAvailable() -> Bool {
    if let refUnicodePng = Character.refUnicodePng,
        let myPng = self.png(ofSize: Character.refUnicodeSize) {
        return refUnicodePng != myPng
    }
    return false
}

Discussion

1. All characters will be rendered as a png at the same size (8) as defined once in

   static let refUnicodeSize: CGFloat = 8

2. The undefined character U+1FFF image is calculated once in

   static let refUnicodePng = Character("\u{1fff}").png(ofSize: Character.refUnicodeSize)

3. A helper method optionally creates a png from a Character

   func png(ofSize fontSize: CGFloat) -> Data?

1. Example: Test against 3 emoji

let codes:[Character] = ["\u{2764}","\u{1f600}","\u{1F544}"] // ❤️,