Emoji are great. They don't replace language; they add to it, making it richer, and adding the tone missing from online text with multivariate symbols. They're also constantly changing, as the Unicode consortium keeps adding new images—wrestlers! A dumpling!—to the mix.
The best Android emoji experience may not come automatically, as many Android phones don't support the latest emoji symbols. That may also mean that when your friends on iOS send emoji to your Android phone, all you see is little squares or nothing at all. These tips will help you get the best Android emoji you can.
For Very Old Android Phones
It takes an operating system update to push new Android emoji. If you have a very old Android phone, running a version earlier than 4.1, you won't be able to display any emoji at all. If you want to use emoji for texting on one of these devices, you need to install a third-party keyboard app and use Hangouts as your texting app. Hangouts renders its own emoji.
If you don't text, be aware that Facebook and WhatsApp have their own emoji sets, so you'll be just fine with those apps. There's no way to render emoji in a browser or email on an Android phone this old.
To switch your texting app to Hangouts, go into Hangouts on your phone. Tap the menu button (three lines) on the left-hand side of the screen. Pick Settings > SMS > Turn On SMS. Once it's on, go back to your home screen. Press and hold on the texting app at the bottom of the screen, and drag it up to where "Remove" appears. Then open your app drawer. Press and hold on the Hangouts icon, and drag it to where the texting app was. Now you can text with emoji.
If you want to send emoji, you'll also need to download and install an emoji-compatible keyboard from the Google Play Store. SwiftKey and Gboard are good ones. To activate it, go to Settings > Language and Input, and click the check box next to SwiftKey or Gboard, and then tap on Default to set it to your default keyboard.
Getting Android Emoji on Newer Phones
Newer versions of Android support emoji, but they may not support all of the emoji your iPhone-owning friends can see. That's because emoji get added with system upgrades, and Android phone makers have a bad habit of not upgrading their software.
If you don't see emoji in your keyboard, you just need to turn them on. Go to Settings > Language and Input. After that, it depends on your device. You should be able to either tap Keyboard or pick the Google Keyboard directly. Go into Preferences (or Advanced) and turn the emoji option on. There should now be a smiley (emoji) button near the space bar on your Android keyboard. Or, just download and activate SwiftKey.
For texting, the best way to get the latest emoji is to download the app Textra and replace your texting app with it (in the same way as I explained with Hangouts.) Textra not only has all of the latest emoji, it has optional add-ons which will show emoji in the iOS style. That way, you won't have confusion based on
...not looking like
...although they're the same character.
You'll probably see a bunch of "emoji keyboard" apps in the Play Store. Feel free to play with them, but understand that they won't affect how emoji are displayed on your phone, just how you input them.
Android Emoji vs. iOS Emoji
There are several different emoji character sets, not only between Android and iOS, but also between different versions of Android, between different applications, and on Samsung and LG phones. If you want to see the differences, go to Emojipedia and either enter the name of an emoji, or pick Categories and go looking for your emoji. It will show you all the different styles. This BuzzFeed story shows some of the confusion that may result when users of different platforms text each other.
Using Textra along with its iOS plugin will show your texting emoji the way they would appear on iPhones. Textra has a bunch of other character set options, too.
This won't get you the latest emoji in other locations, such as in your browser. If you want to display the latest emoji everywhere, that becomes much tougher, and it involves rooting your phone. If you root your Android phone, you can then use the app Emoji Switcher to change out the emoji set to the new one, which comes with Android 7.1 Nougat. For more on rooting, see this explainer from ExtremeTech.
If you don't want to root your phone, grab the app Emojily. That just lets you paste a string of emoji from any app and see what they would have looked like on an iPhone, to prevent confusion. If you tend to see a lot of mysterious box emoji, use Textra as a translator. Copy the box emoji and paste them into Textra (in a text to yourself), and you'll see what they're supposed to be.