• Android: provides support for Unicode emoji with backwards-compatibility down to Android 2.2
• Java: converts emoticons to their corresponding Unicode emoji

Emoji require a character encoding that can represent the specific characters from the Unicode character set. Common examples are UTF-8 and UTF-16.

UTF-16 uses 2 bytes for all characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) which includes all code points up to U+FFFF. For characters above that code point, it uses 4 bytes (non-BMP).

GSM text messages (SMS) must be encoded in UTF-16 (70 chars limit) instead of the GSM 7-bit alphabet (160 chars limit) if you want to use Emoji. Non-BMP characters consume 2 of the 70 characters each.

In Java, only BMP characters fit into a single char. Character.toChars(...) returns char[] with a size of 1 for BMP characters and 2 for non-BMP characters.

On MySQL 5.5.3+, you have to use the utf8mb4 encoding instead of utf8 because it introduces support for non-BMP characters. Prior to that MySQL version, you would have to use a BLOB instead, for example.

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