emoticons show up as symbols in iMessage

Hello TCCCC,

Thank you for the details of the emoji issue you are experiencing on your iPhone 5s. If you are recieving a square or unexpected symbol, it may be that the sender is using another carrier or has a different version of iOS on their device. I recommend reviewing the following article for more information:

Symptoms

When using emoji in messages, mail, or other text fields, you may occasionally encounter the following:

• Emoji may not display as expected or match the sent emoji.
• Instead of emoji, the other device may display squares, equal signs, or question marks.
• Unexpected line breaks may appear before or after the emoji.
• You may be unable to reply to email messages that contain emoji or other unexpected characters. You may need to remove these to reply to the email.

Resolution

If any of the above issues occur, try to resend without using emoji.

Emoji does not appear correctly on the receiving device

Certain emoji characters may not display correctly on iOS devices, OS X, or on non-iOS mobile phones. When sent to these devices, the emoji characters may appear as blank space or boxes. This can occur when sending content with emoji to:

• An iOS device on another carrier's network
• A non-iOS device on your carrier's network or another carrier's network
• When using Mail for OS X v10.7 or later (earlier versions of OS X do not support emoji)

See this article for more information.

You can find the full article here:

iOS: Troubleshooting emoji issues

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts2450

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.

Best,

Sheila M.