Emoji on Twitter: rip-off, or inspired?

If you are on a platform with native Emoji support, you may have been confused today by Twitter announcing that they now support Emoji on the web.

What this update does is replace Emoji characters in a tweet with an Emoji image instead. The result is that older operating systems and browsers that don’t support native Emoji can now see what they have been missing, as all browsers support these images.

Here are some Emojis in a tweet as it looks on Twitter on the web:

Had you not been paying attention, you may have assumed these Emojis above were the Apple ones. To jog your memory, these are the same characters from the Apple Emoji font:

Twitter has recreated every Emoji character, but rather than having their own take on the icon design (as Google has done in Android 4.4), the biggest difference between the Twitter Emoji and Apple’s is that the information desk girl is wearing a purple top instead of a pink one.

Are these Emojis a rip-off, or just inspired by Apple?

See the list of all Twitter Emojis.