Introducing Jetpack Emoji Picker: A New Way to Add Emojis to Your Android App

The use of emojis in communication has become increasingly popular in recent years. These small icons can be used to express a wide range of emotions and can add a personal touch to messages. However, adding emojis to your Android app can be a bit of a challenge. That's where the Emoji picker library comes in. You can simply add a few lines of code to your app, and you'll be able to start using emojis right away. It's the easiest way to get started with emojis, and it will make your app more fun and expressive.

Every year, new emoji versions are published, and we will regularly update the library to provide these new emojis. Higher-end phones will be able to render these newer emojis without any problem. For lower-end phones, newer emoji may be displayed as a small square box called tofu (☐). The library guarantees to detect and remove them. This ensures the library is compatible across multiple Android versions/devices.

The library has several optimizations that attempt to reduce startup latency and speed up scrolling experience, such as caching renderable emojis, drawing emojis asynchronously and RecyclerView optimizations.

User selections are persistent in the library. Emojis that are newly chosen will be shown at the top row, making it simpler for users to find and share them. The library also offers a variety of emojis that represent different people and cultures in the variant panels. If the user chooses an emoji from one of the variation panels (Figure 2), the choice is retained and set as the default in the main panel.

dependencies {
   implementation "androidx.emoji2:emojipicker:$version"
}

<androidx.emoji2.emojipicker.EmojiPickerView
    ...
    app:emojiGridColumns="9" />

// a listener example
emojiPickerView.setOnEmojiPickedListener {
    findViewById<EditText>(R.id.edit_text).append(it.emoji)
}