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I am developing an app that uses emoji and have some legal concerns.
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Individual emojis, whether proprietary or platform-implemented Unicode-defined, are presumptively copyrightable as graphical images.
Who owns it? No-one owns the name emoji, just like no one owns the name tree, house, computer, or icon. While there are many people and companies involved at various stages of emoji approval — particularly the Unicode Consortium — none claim ownership over the name emoji.
Microsoft's Emoji Become Open Source so we started to have these other rich conversations that were almost as engaged as the video conversations we were having. Emojis started to play a bigger and bigger role... and that enabled people to feel a little more comfortable with authentically reacting to things emotively.
Other apps such as Signal and Telegram continue to use Apple emojis on Android. These steps have made sense, given that Apple does own the copyright to its emoji font and a casual user looking at an Android app with Apple's emojis could easily mistake it for an unusual-looking iPhone.
Emoji are generally rendered on your device by locally stored fonts licensed to the end user for use with their operating system. In this case copyright is irrelevant as your software is not distributing the artworks any more than my answer to this question is distributing the Arial typeface.
If you need to render Emoji on a system that has no such font, then you're looking at copyright issues as you'll need to distribute original artworks.
To distribute fonts outside of a licensed OS or create and distribute image files from them would be subject to the license that comes with the OS and/or its font files.
For example the Gemoji project has made bitmap version of Apple Emoji and is copyright of Apple - whether that means you can use them as long as you add a copyright notice or not, I cannot tell you.
By contrast, Android's Emoji font is licensed under the Apache 2 license, so I think (and I'm not a lawyer) that you may use the font according to those terms in your own work. I am using Android Emoji as a web font here if you're interested.
Worth noting too is the Phantom Emoji project which is creating an open source set of full colour emoji.
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