Ikea Develops Its Own Emojis, for When You Need to Text About Swedish Meatballs

The Swedish furniture maker and brain-hacking home-retail maze is playing couples therapist in a new campaign from the Netherlands that announces the launch of Ikea Emoticons. These special little text-message pictures will supposedly reduce friction at home by letting you more efficiently text your significant other about having, for example, vacuumed the house.

Ridiculous as that premise may be, it's a cute idea. And the resulting alphabet includes some clear winners, like a symbol for Swedish meatballs, as well as harder-to-explain gems, like a symbol for a green-eared dachshund. (Where in the real world does such a thing exist, without taking peyote?)

In the video, a salesman with a thick accent and expert method of smugly grabbing his white lab coat tells you where to download the emojis to your phone.

Alas, a number of reviews in Apple's App Store pan the whole thing as a false promise. The emojis, critics claim, are not small at all but giant pictures that you have to copy and paste into your texts, which requires granting the app full access to a phone's keyboard. (And funny thing, not everyone trusts Ikea.) Another review, which doesn't read at all like an Ikea agency employee wrote it, blames the complaints on Apple's coding restrictions.

Sadly, there are more fundamental flaws. For some inexplicable reason, the alphabet doesn't seem to include a cinnamon bun emoji, or, even worse, a person tearing his or her own hair out and screaming while standing over a pile of sticks and pegs that are supposed to become a shelf emoji. Which means you'll have to fake it with an Allen wrench and an angry face, just like in real life.

Via PFSK.