Android Keyboard (AOSP) 4.4 4.4-892118

Google officially released Android 4.4 KitKat today, which is only available for the Nexus 5 currently, but will be coming to other Nexus devices soon. Obviously, there are a ton of improvements and new features with this latest version, but perhaps one of the less-known features making its first appearance in Android is emoji, which will come default with the Android keyboard in KitKat.
Until now, only third-party Android keyboards delivered emoji icons to Android, and most users thought you were an iPhone user anyway if you used emoji, even on Android, but now that it’s a native feature, both iOS and Android can share the love without any iOS assumptions going on.
Before today, texting back and forth between an iPhone and an Android device was pretty cumbersome when emoji were involved. iPhone users would type in an entertaining emoji icon, but Android’s default text messaging app wasn’t able to support it. Third-party apps, like Google Hangouts, allowed for seamless cross-platform emoji, but it wasn’t text messaging by any means.