“Now, our phones have fancy retina screens and somewhere along the way an important part of what made emoji so handy was left by the wayside: their simplicity.”
The first emoji set in 1999 had 176 simple pictures. Now each one is a detailed illustration, and every detail rules out something else. There is one dancer and no hula. Google’s answer is plain glyphs you can recolor like text, which is where emoji started.