Emojli launched on August 29, 2014 — a social media app that restricted usernames and messages to emoji only. No letters, no numbers, no punctuation. YouTubers Tom Scott and Matt Gray built it after seeing the success of Yo, an app whose entire function was sending the word "Yo" to your contacts.
By launch day, 70,000 unique emoji-only usernames had been reserved. Scott coded the backend in PHP and MySQL; Gray built the frontend in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The pair ran into problems because "not all web browsers supported emoji, and mobile operating system support for them varied." All the work was done in their spare time and took a little over a month.
At the Electromagnetic Field Festival, the developers admitted the app "originated largely as a joke." After press coverage, they started receiving offers for venture capital. They declined. The cost of maintaining the app proved unsustainable, and Emojli shut down on July 30, 2015 — eleven months after launch. The developers confirmed it "will not be resurrected."
