How to get Apple Color Emojis to work on Ubuntu?

The Apple Color Emoji font will not work in Linux and is not licensed for use outside Apple products.

I'll assume your actual goal is simply displaying color emoji on Linux. You can install EmojiOne Color or Twitter Color Emoji for full color emoji, including skin tone diversity, and country flags.

Note: The font uses the SVG-in-OpenType format and will currently only show color emoji in Firefox, Thunderbird and other Mozilla Gecko-based applications. This is not a limitation of the font, but of the operating systems and applications. Regular B&W outline emoji are included for backwards/fallback compatibility.

Available for manual installation on the Github release pages or via my Launchpad PPA:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:eosrei/fonts
sudo apt-get update
# Choose one!
sudo apt-get install fonts-emojione-svginot
# Or
sudo apt-get install fonts-twemoji-svginot

EmojiOne Color in Firefox: Twitter Color Emoji in Firefox: Probably obvious, but full disclosure anyway: I made both fonts.

It isn't very easy to do this but if you have KDE it will be a little easier.

First, Open Terminal and type the following command:

sudo apt install kubuntu-desktop

Once it is done installing, go to https://www.emojipedia.org/apple in your webbrowser. Screenshot each one of those emojis. Open the screenshots with gimp and transparent the background.

Now, open system settings and click on the tab that says icons. It will put you in icon settings. In icon settings there will be two tabs. One will say Icons, and one will say Emoticons. Click the one that says Emoticons. A little plus sign will be on the bottom left corner. Click it. It will ask for the name of the theme so put Apple. Then it will ask you to select the theme of emoticons you want to create so click KDE Emoticons Theme.

Now, click the tab that says Apple. There will be a plus sign on the bottom left corner and one in the middle click the one in the middle. Add all the screenshots you took and type what you want to activate them.

Then, select Apple as your default emoji theme.

When you toggle emoticon list, the apple emojis will be there instead of the google emojis.

Only do this if you really care about having apple emojis on ubuntu because it is pretty hard to screenshot each one of the emojis and transparent the backgrounds.

You can install the Apple emoji font following the instructions on this repository.

After installing that font I got the Apple emojis on some pages, like emojipedia, but not in many other websites or Linux apps, such as the terminal.