Imho Unicode is the only accepted universal system how to sustainably maintain emoji… recent and all future ones.

Unicode has over 1.1 millions of coding points and it is allocated space ~16 pct only.

All alphabets’ characters are described, all emojis are in… and you still have 800,000 positions available for future.

There are more than 300,000-400,000 fonts and everybody with FontMaker can make another fork/copy/enhance “basic” sans or sans-serif fonts…

…and all of them use Unicode as base.

U+1F600 for smile. :)

Edit: TIL that empty square used in a font for non-existing representation of Unicode character is called tofu :) □