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Yes. Even if you don't like them, the genie's out of the bottle. They're going to exist no matter what any one person or organization does. Given this, surely it's better for them to be as compatible as possible. It's better for the people who like them and I don't see how it leaves the ones who don't any worse off. (Which in an odd sort of way, ties right back into the theme of the OP.)
The way emojis are encoded is very complex, to allow for all the variations without encoding each possible variation as its own character. This leads to bugs and even security issues in everything that needs to display Unicode text.
Even so, wouldn't you rather have one set of bugs and security issues, or at most one per platform, than as many as there are apps (or worse, as many as there are app/platform combinations)?
In that case, the bugs would be in the social media apps/websites, not in the operating system's text rendering routines. That's a much better place for them to be. Websites are very restricted in what they can do, and on mobile platforms so are applications.
It also would never have gotten anywhere near this situation to begin with. In the olden days, forums displayed emoticons by doing replacements on strings like
:)or:smile:. There's really not that much that can go wrong with a system like that. (Often enough these codes still work in fact, but they are now replaced with Unicode rather than an image.)Unicode emojis have two big problems. The first and biggest is the design, they were made to be composable, as the designers foresaw that it would be extended and apparently considered that a good thing. For example, [woman] + [sunglasses] gets you a woman wearing sunglasses. I remember the reaction when the 'pregnant man' emoji came out, but really, what else should [pregnant] + [male modifier] do? That's not crazy, it isn't even trying.
You can have a cutesy couple, [man] + [heart] + [woman]. Or you can have a cutesy gay couple, one of whom is pregnant, and both are wearing sunglasses, [man] + [sunglasses] + [heart] + [pregnant] + [male modifier] + [sunglasses]. They could each additionally have a hairstyle, hair color and skin color defined. At this point it's becoming a design flaw that they didn't include the equivalent of parentheses to formally specify the order of composition (though let's not give them ideas). And we want to put this all in the operating system's text rendering routines. Define them all in fonts! As ligatures! Madness, I tell you.
The only limit is that unofficial combinations don't need to be supported (though you are certainly welcome to try), as long as you can display the component parts in order. For example, an old enough system is going to render [pregnant] + [male modifier] as a pregnant woman and an Ares symbol.
Which brings me to the second problem, the Unicode Consortium. There's a single body that decides this, and it can be lobbied, and is it ever. Everybody wants their pet issue represented, and they've really got no reason to deny anyone, because the design already allows it. In the olden days this wasn't a thing. You try convincing phpBB to add your thing, and MSN, and AOL, and whatever else there used to be.
This is why I liked this decision, because it means sanity won at least once. Consider the alternative, that you could say "cutesy gay couple, one of whom is pregnant, one is black with curly hair and one is white with short red hair, with a bald Asian boy and a white girl with long, straight dark hair". This kind of composition is already allowed, but could've been made mandatory to support, in the dark mirror universe.
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