TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — An American software developer on Monday revealed how Apple selectively blocks the Taiwanese flag emoji on its devices specifically located in China.

As early as 2018, users of Apple devices in China noticed that after the release of iOS 9.0, the Taiwan flag emoji was no longer available on their keyboards. Instead, the emoji displayed a missing character when read on websites or even messages on Apple devices set to China.

Change noticed by China users in 2018. (Twitter, Emojipedia screengrab)

In 2019, iPhone users in Hong Kong and Macau also started noticing the Taiwan flag emoji had disappeared from their devices after the iOS 13.1.1 update was installed. Any iPhone user who switched their country setting to China, Hong Kong, or Macau noticed that the Taiwan flag emoji disappeared, while it would reappear if the setting was elsewhere in the world, including Taiwan.

Change noticed by Hong Kong and Macau users in 2019. (Twitter, thisboyuan)

On Monday (Oct. 17), Stephen Casas, who is located in the U.S., took to Reddit to write that he is the developer of Mouseless Messenger, which is an Alfred workflow that enables users to send and read conversations in macOS Messages without having to interact with the macOS Messages app. He recently decided to add the option to include emoji characters from within the workflow.

Code for Taiwan flag emoji. (Stephan Casas screenshot)

When he began to examine the coding, he discovered the symbol IsDeviceInGreaterChina, indicating there was a difference in what emojis were displayed depending on whether the device was in or outside "Greater China" (China, Hong Kong, and Macau). Recalling news about the exclusion of the Taiwan flag emoji, he tracked down the coding for the Taiwan flag emoji.

Casas then found the commands that check against the device's ISO country code. In one section of the code, he found that if the location is listed as CN (China), the Taiwan flag emoji will not display, but will for any other country.

Code that removes Taiwan flag emoji for China users. (Stephan Casas screenshot)

Casas wrote that although he had known about this practice for quite some time, "there's something about seeing its implementation that just struck me as excessively disingenuous." He added that is especially the case for a firm "whose values tend to be very focused on freedom of expression and choice."

The developer pointed out that was particularly troubling to see that the Taiwanese flag was the "only emoji entity which appears in the CharacterPalette binary in this way." He emphasized that the ISO code for China, CN, is stored as a literal, not a dynamic value.

Casas explained to Taiwan News that this means that the way Apple implemented this block is unique and was "clearly designed to accommodate the demands of one government." He argued that if Apple had wanted to implement a very flexible system designed to block the use of many emojis, "they would have written this code in a much different way."

He described the emoji as a language that "flirts with the idea of universal comprehension among all humans." He asserted that redacting or censoring an emoji to any extent runs contrary to the purpose of Unicode and is "nothing short of a willful attempt to control the conversation, and can be driven by nothing but ill intent."

Apple has never responded to requests by the media to comment on changes it has made to its operating systems in 2018 and 2019 that began blocking the Taiwan flag emoji in China, Hong Kong, and Macau.