What’s on Your Home Screen, Jeremy Burge?
The Emojipedia founder on rude weather apps and living on a boat
This is “What’s on Your Home Screen?” a Q&A column from OneZero. We want to understand more about how people use their smartphones — those life-consuming devices we dump hours into every day — to pave a way toward a better future. Or at least a more reflective one. We’ll add new entries regularly, and each will feature a new interview with a notable person about the apps they use, how they’re organized, and whether those red bubbles drive them nuts.
Perhaps no one on this planet knows more about emoji than Jeremy Burge. He founded Emojipedia and serves as a vice chair on the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, which makes key decisions around those iconic little characters.
(He is also, full disclosure, a friend — which is why I didn’t worry too much about giving him a hard time over his generic wallpaper.)
Burge’s professional life revolves around how people communicate using modern technology. And so I assumed he’d have a deliberate approach to his iPhone’s home screen — maybe even some wisdom for the rest of us.
What I didn’t expect is a recommendation for a weather app that openly berates its users.
