Google CEO Sundar Pichai published a tweet saying he would “drop everything” Monday to resolve the placement of the cheese in the cheeseburger emoji. It started over the weekend after the founder of Baekdal Media pointed out the difference between how Apple and Google make cheeseburgers, and from there the internet did what the internet does.
Pichai responded saying he’d give the emoji’s design priority over everything else — assuming everyone could first agree on the correct way to build a cheeseburger.
Looking at Emojipedia, Google was the only company putting the cheese underneath the hamburger patty. Which is objectively weird. The Unicode Consortium doesn’t require emojis to look the same everywhere; it provides the description, code and basic pictograph, and each company gets to design its own version however it thinks makes sense.
That’s why the same emoji can look completely different depending on where you see it — and sometimes, apparently, one company decides cheese belongs underneath meat.
The cheeseburger wasn’t Google’s only emoji getting roasted that weekend. People also noticed that its beer mug had foam floating above the drink like a little beer cloud, while the mug itself was only half full.
Which raises an important question: who the hell poured this beer?
The tweets might seem ridiculous, but they also show how quickly tiny design details can turn into a whole thing once enough people notice them. Thomas Baekdal’s original burger tweet took off, Sundar Pichai got involved, and suddenly Google was publicly discussing the proper construction of a digital cheeseburger.
I still think the Apple burger looks right. Cheese goes on top of the patty. And if you’re giving me a beer emoji, at least fill the damn glass.