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What it does

EmojiChat removes the keyboard. You can send emoji and nothing else, which turns an ordinary conversation into a small puzzle for both people.

It works the way a messaging app is expected to: one-to-one and named group chats, swipe to reply, long-press to react, presence and seen receipts, and daily streaks. There are no passwords - your email is the account, and you sign in with a magic link. Friends are added by sharing a short pin code. If you have nobody to talk to yet, Emoji Buddy is a built-in AI you can practise against.

It has its own site at emojichat.net.

How it was built

The idea came from two of my kids, who wanted a chat app with no words in it. The first version shipped in August 2024 doing almost nothing, and the interesting features arrived much later.

• August 2024 - first release. Emoji-only messages and passwordless sign-in, and not much else.
• September 2024 - animated emoji.
• December 2024 - pin codes for adding friends, replacing a search nobody could make work.
• January 2025 - better emoji search, so “fire” also finds fireman and fireworks.
• July 2026 - the big one: named groups, replies, reactions, presence, seen receipts, Emoji Buddy and chat streaks, across six releases in two weeks.

The constraint is the whole product, and it is also the hard part. Without text there is no way to clarify, so everything else - replies, reactions, groups - has to carry meaning that words would normally carry.

Status

Around 5,000 installs on Android. Actively maintained - the most recent release was July 2026.

Platforms

iOS 15 and later, including iPad. Android.

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Need support? Visit our support page, or see the portfolio.