Animated Emojis

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See also: Mobile Stickers And Wallpapers

Column: What are Feature Phone Emojis and Stickers?

In short, they are almost the same as your messenger emojis, GIFs and stickers.

Before these things became a global trend, Japanese people used to do the same on feature phones, thanks to “i-mode”, the mobile internet service that changed how we communicated.

These assets were called “Decome” (or “Decore”, depends on the mobile carrier) and downloadable from feature phone-limited websites, which mostly required a paid subscription via the mobile carrier the user contracted with. In modern days, LINE operates a similar platform in some parts of Asia.

A Little of My Background

I used to work for one of the emoji/sticker platform operators. I didn’t only create emojis and stickers, but I also designed and coded platform webpages for all three major carriers ¹ (they used slightly different markup languages), and tested if the websites were working correctly.

From the inside, this version of mobile internet seemed far from perfection. It was not fully compatible with Gmail nor other services due to the special coding languages, despite the fact that its unlimited-data plan cost the same as a home internet plan. Then, there was even a 100KB page size limitation. Though thanks to this hardcore limitation, I could learn how to make a webpage more accessible with faster loading speed by optimizing images without sacrificing their quality, which is still my mantra of creative professionalism even after decades.