It might not be marked in your diary, but 17 July is World Emoji Day. Why? Because, if you’re on an Apple or Google platform, that’s the date the calendar emoji shows.

To mark the occasion, Apple replaced all of its executive headshots with cartoony “memoji”, a new feature coming in iOS 12 for iPhone X users, which lets them create custom avatars and ping them over to friends and family.

The feature was introduced in June by Apple vice-president Craig Federighi, who boasted that “we’ve worked hard to build a deep set of customisation options to let our customers create an incredibly diverse set of memoji”. And Apple’s not the only one.

A couple of weeks earlier, an Android developer had discovered a test feature hidden in the Facebook app that introduced Avatars — cartoonish lookalikes that can be used “to communicate with your friends and express yourself across Facebook”.

To Jacob “Ba” Blackstock, it’s not surprising that these tech titans have each landed on a similar idea about what’s missing from modern communication. The only strange thing is how long it took them to catch up.

“We caught on to this a long time ago,” Blackstock says. “I can remember being in a roomful of investors, in one of these pitch sessions six years ago and telling this roomful of people it was inevitable that everyone on the internet would have an avatar — and we’re going to make them. Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the room were scratching their head.”

Blackstock is the co-founder of Bitmoji, the Snap-owned avatar app, which he describes as “the Kleenex of cartoons ... if people see a cartoon representation of someone, even if we had nothing to do with it, they’ll call it a Bitmoji.”

The app was born in 2007 as a website called Bitstrips, with a rather different goal: letting users without an artistic background easily create short comic strips. It was popular enough but its real breakthrough came five years later, when it was released as a Facebook app. If you were on the site in 2013, you can’t have missed the explosion that followed: the company rapidly swelled to more than 10 million users, with 50m strips created over the next six months.

Snapchat acquisition

The pivot to Bitmoji came the following year, as the company focused directly on a use case that had always been popular among Bitstrips users: self-representation. The free-form comic strip feature was replaced with a more guided selection of sticker packs, letting users insert themselves into easily meme-able images to send to friends and family. That switch also took Bitmoji from the internet on to phones directly, setting the stage for its acquisition by Snapchat in 2016.

“People talk about an acquisition as an exit,” Blackstock says, “and yet this has definitely been the most interesting chapter of the whole thing — which has been a long story.”

In 2017, as Bitmoji and Snapchat integration grew tighter. The app rose up download charts to become the most downloaded iOS app of the year worldwide — with Snapchat itself in second place.

Over those two years, Blackstock says, “We’ve seen Bitmoji gets integrated more and more to the point where now, it’s pretty cool for me: every time I see any article about Snap with screenshots there’s Bitmoji all over it.”

The service, he says, carries a couple of big ideas. “One of them is communicating with cartoons. That was the obvious first point of integration: seamlessly integrating the Bitmoji library into the chat experience in Snap, and then expanding to the camera experience so you can add Bitmoji to your photos.”

But it’s the other aspect that’s where the competition comes from: Bitmoji as a “visual identity”. On Snapchat, all users are represented by their Bitmoji, in icons, on the “Snap Map”, and increasingly in augmented reality (AR) features as well, inserting a virtual avatar into the real world.

Earlier this month, Snap released Bitmoji Kit, a simple tool that lets other app developers incorporate the avatars into their own software. Initial integrations are simple — you can now send Bitmoji to your Tinder matches, which feels like a high-stakes way to make a first impression — but it’s not hard to see how they could grow, particularly with the growth in AR and VR worlds, which require the use of avatars to represent people.

Avatar

Enter Apple and Facebook. “It definitely feels somewhat validating — and a bit of an honour — to be copied by the largest companies in the world,” Blackstock laughs.

He sees the appeal to those large companies of owning the visual identity of the future. “An avatar, literally, is an incarnation. It enables you to put a version of yourself into another realm. This goes all the way back to Hinduism, where the word came from,” Blackstock says.

“Now, with what’s happening with technology, and how it has been becoming such an integral part of society, it’s like we’re all living in a video game. So it’s a no-brainer: you’re living in this world, you need to have a presence in this world.

“So when I see Apple and Facebook making these moves, it’s representative of the impact we’ve had proving the importance of this idea. Competition is a fact of life in any business. I’ve seen the Apple thing but I haven’t seen what Facebook’s doing — presumably it will be as close as possible clones of Bitmojis, that’s what they try to do.”

Even if AR and VR technology never reaches the heights that its supporters suggest, Blackstock still sees a universal need for online avatars. “For us, the way we look at Bitmoji is: it’s not just about the avatar, it’s what you do with it. How is this useful to you in your life?

“Using it for communication, that’s been the game changer. In real life, you are the medium of your expression and your identity is a key layer in that expression. And that’s what Bitmoji’s bringing to the table.”