Hi, all. I run product at Quartz. Sam Williams is the developer who made the keyboard (but he's at WWDC, so you're stuck with me :) We did it in partnership with Emojipedia. More info here: http://qz.com/423743
It's not the kind of app you'd expect from a news organization, but that's half of the point :) Hope you like it! Happy to answer any questions.
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Hunter
@zseward always love app surprises like this from places where you least expect them.
Where did the idea to do this app come from? Always interested in how companies like Quartz decide to give a fun idea like this a try.
Any plans for other diplomatic / worldly emojis? National animals? :P
@rustydingo This was one of those "toss out a half-baked idea on a Friday, look at the first prototype by Monday" kind of projects, which is always fun.
We have been playing around with a more full-fledged app for Quartz, and in the middle of that project, iOS 8.3 was released with support for all these new emoji flags. Someone observed that the standard emoji keyboard only includes about 40 flags, so why not make a keyboard for tying all of them? That was pretty much it! :)
As I guess you know, Quartz's general topic area is global business, with a heavy focus on global, so there was some resonance there, too.
I think it's unlikely we expand the set of emoji beyond the flags because the standard emoji keyboard covers most of the others (and it appears that iOS 9 will add all 208 flags to the emoji keyboard, as well :) But you should still use ours because it comes with labels!
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Hunter
@zseward awesome thanks Zach. Love that you guys just rolled with it. Looking forward to the Quartz app, I'm always interested in what publishers are doing on mobile considering the different ways to "get" content nowadays (Social, Circa, Flipboard, Apple News, etc)
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Hunter
Thought it was really interesting that Quartz's first app was a keyboard featuring all the world's flags - http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/...
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