And it's not that the new emojis are all necessarily bad. My issue is confusion over what the recipient will see when I select one of the new emojis. I'm still not 100% clear on the emoji set mapping between OEMs/OSes. :-/
They have the same meaning, namely the one encoded in Unicode.
Just because different platforms have different fonts does not charge they meaning.
An "a" in Helvetica has the same meaning as in Times New Roman, but the glyph is different. "" means the same thing, even though I inputted it as the Android yellow blobs, I see it as a simple black and white symbol and an iPhone user reading this will see another different image.
When people look for an emoji in their phone's keyboard to express something, they don't read the Unicode description for that emoji. When people receive them, they don't read the description either.
Thus why it's important that, even if they don't have the same style across platforms (like an 'a' in Helvetica and in Times), they have to depict the same thing.
For example, if from your HTC phone you send a smiley that looks pretty content and calm, users of most other platforms will receive it as "I'm freaking sick of this". The meaning encoded in Unicode for it is "face with look of triumph" ( https://emojipedia.org/face-with-look-of-triumph/ ), which isn't what you meant, nor what your receiver understood.
They were always technically speaking compatible (Nougat and iOS10 have Unicode parity iirc, now Oreo pushes ahead with new Unicode points).
However, the blobs didn't always socially have the same meaning as iOS emojis. The push to the more circular emojis was to normalize them against iOS emojis, which for better or worse are the primary target of emoji use.
One can use https://emojipedia.org/ if one knows the recepient's device. While there's still cultural impact, i.e. is a praying emoji or high five? Or is laughing or whining?
