Android - Emoji not showing up correctly after updating Appcompat in older OS

[geriux]

Describe the bug
We recently got pinged to investigate an issue on Android related to newer emojis not showing up in some scenarios.

I tried updating Appcompat to 1.4.2 and after testing in a few emulators I saw newer emojis weren't showing up for older OS versions of Android.

At first, I thought it was related to our custom implementation with Aztec but this was discarded after I tested the built-in React Native component and found the same issue. I checked that React Native is extending AppCompatActivity as it is suggested in this documentation, I also checked it uses AppCompatTextView and AppCompatEditText internally.

This issue only happens with the TextInput component, for the Text component it does work as expected:

Emulator running OS 10

The example above was also done using the latest React Native version 0.71.0.

We should continue investigations to see if there are other workarounds to be able to support newer emojis in older versions of Android.

[fluiddot]

@geriux To better understand the impact of the issue, is this issue affecting TextInput and RichtText/Aztect components? If so, since this will be affecting the content of posts/pages, I think we should prioritize it.

[geriux]

@geriux To better understand the impact of the issue, is this issue affecting TextInput and RichtText/Aztect components? If so, since this will be affecting the content of posts/pages, I think we should prioritize it.

That's correct it is affecting both TextInput and RichText/Aztec components on older versions of Android's OS.

[SiobhyB]

I changed the priority from high to medium. I agree this is something we should fix, but think the fact this is limited to older OS version and that we haven't had many reports warrants the lowering of the priority. Open to differing thoughts!