title: Implementations of Emoji (Emoticon) View/Keyboard Layouts
body: <p>I am trying to figure out how the emoji (emoticon) selections are implemented on the <code>Facebook</code> app and the Google <code>Hangouts</code> app.  I looked into the <code>SoftKeyboard</code> Demo app in the Android API Samples but the display of these emoji views does not look like a <code>SoftKeyboard</code>.  It looks and behaves more like a custom <code>Dialog</code> view.  Does anyone have an idea of how these are implemented?</p>
  <h2>Facebook App</h2>
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/7pFwS.png" alt="Facebook" /></p>
  <h2>Google Hangouts app</h2>
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/WVUst.png" alt="Hangouts" /></p>
  <p>Also, is <a href="http://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode" rel="noreferrer">Unicode</a> the best way to send emoticons or is there an alternative?  I noticed that some <code>Unicode</code> sequences like <code>\u1F601</code> don't render the corresponding emoticon and instead that sequence just shows up as <code>1</code> :</p>
  <pre><code>EditText messageInput = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.message_input);
  messageInput.getText().append(&quot;\u1F601&quot;);
  </code></pre>