Access most recently used emojis list in iOS

Question

In iOS, in the native Emoji keyboard, you can see your most recently used Emojis. I would like to know if it is possible to get the data on those Emojis (which is app-independent) from inside my app.

My goal is to display the most used emoji, given a user, in my app.

Answer 1

If you just want an Emoji selector you could use/modify libraries like SYEmojiPopover or AGEmojiKeyboard which allows you to have full control on the output without messing with the iOS internals (albeit the "recents" list will be app-specific).

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On iOS 9 the preferences are stored in the com.apple.EmojiPreferences suite, which you could extract the list of most recently used emoji by:

// swift 3:
let prefs = UserDefaults(suiteName: "com.apple.EmojiPreferences")!
let defaults = prefs.dictionary(forKey: "EmojiDefaultsKey")!["EmojiRecentsDefaultsKey"]! as! [String: Any]
let recents = defaults["RecentsKey"]! as! [String]
print(recents)

// swift 2:
let prefs = NSUserDefaults(suiteName: "com.apple.EmojiPreferences")!
let recents = prefs.dictionaryForKey("EmojiDefaultsKey")!["EmojiRecentsDefaultsKey"]!["RecentsKey"]! as! [String]
print(recents)

// prints e.g. ["🔁", "🚳", "🚿", "⌛", "👶", "🇿🇦", "⛪", "🚆", "🚅"]

Note that this is UNDOCUMENTED, and I have only checked it works on iOS 9 when deployed via Xcode. There is no guarantee that the App Store reviewers will allow this usage, nor there is any guarantee that it will work in the past or future versions.