IOS emoji unicode list

Question

iOS keeps releasing new "emojis"; last night iOS 8.3 was released, which includes tons more. Is there one defacto list of all unicode representations of all emojis, or does iOS/Android/etc use some private encoding scheme for their emoji set?

I found one list on a PHP site but there are 5 different columns and I'm uncertain whether everyone is now using the column labeled "unified": http://code.iamcal.com/php/emoji/

As additional information, what I REALLY am trying to do is build a "unicode representation of emoji, sentiment" list that gives the sentiment (positive negative etc) of commonly used emojis' so if you happen to know such a list, that would be even better.

Answer 1

iOS uses standard Unicode characters for Emojis. The Private Use Area is only used for UI icons.

I'm not aware of an up-to-date list of all the characters iOS 8.3 renders as Emojis, but there are some useful charts on the Unicode website, including recently added Emojis, Emoji candidates, and a full list of Emojis that also shows how the characters are rendered on several operating systems.

It's up the operating system which Unicode characters are rendered as Emojis. Most of them are from the "Emoji & Pictographs" character blocks as pointed out by HelloWorld's comment. Many recent updates of the Unicode standard added some emojis or pictographs which subsequently appeared in new releases of operating systems or application software. Also see Which Characters are Emoji in Unicode Technical Report #51: Unicode Emoji.