Japanese emoticons, also known as Kaomoji, are text-based emoticons that use Japanese and other 2-byte characters not commonly found on English or Roman keyboards. They originated in Japan but have become popular worldwide. In Western emoticons, users are limited to using Roman letters and simple punctuation, resulting in straightforward expressions like : ) or ;P. However, with the inclusion of 2-byte characters from various other languages, Kaomoji offer a much wider range of possibilities to create expressive emoticons such as โ๏∀๏ใ or ƪ(ƪ꒪ৱ৹).
This website provided an easy-to-use collection of over 10,000 Japanese emoticons, divided into categories that users could easily copy and paste into other applications. It was my first major online success and in 2016 I sold everything to an investment company in Israel.
JapaneseEmoticons.me was featured on popular websites such as AppTurbo, Bustle, Know Your Meme as well as the front page of Reddit which resulted in the site receiving over 155,000 visits in one day. At it’s peak the website ranked #1 on Google for the search term “Japanese emoticons” (as well as several related terms) and received around 25,000 visits per day.
In addition to the website, I also developed a mobile app for iOS and Android which made using Japanese Emoticons easier on smartphones. I designed the app and created all the graphics myself then hired a freelance developer to handle all the coding. The iOS version of the app received over 344,000 downloads (unfortunately I no longer have access to reports from the Android version).
Development screenshots from a more recent unreleased version of the app are below.
