How to decide recently used emoji ordering?

Hey, Lucus.

The way the 'Recently Used' tab works is that it takes the emojis you use most frequently, as well as the emojis you used maybe 5 to 10 minutes ago in a text message.

For example: Let's say you just emailed a friend and sent a thumbs-up emoji and a smiley face. These two will show up as the first two things you will see on the list. Apple will then take emojis from, give or take, an hour ago when you sent another email to someone else and used other emojis. Until it has run out of recently used emojis, it's starting to fill in the rest with emojis you've used a lot. For example, let's say you used the winking face emoji 400 times. It will also show up in the list. It might seem like you don't use it, but in reality, you just haven't used it recently.

I hope this helped. Keep in mind, this isn't actual Apple Support, this is simply the User forums where users help each other out the best they can. I basically collected this data from my own knowledge, so I may not be spot on. Hopefully, I gave you some better insight into how it works.

Like I said in my reply, it's emojis you have statistically used a lot. For example, let's say you haven't used the thumbs up emoji in a month or two. However, statistically, you have used that emoji A LOT. Let's say you used that emoji 4000 times in the lifetime of your phone. You may have not used it last month, but you have used it a lot since the time you got your phone, so thus it appears as a recently used emoji.