Building an emoji-only chat app

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My daughter finds emoji hilarious. She’s 6 and will scroll through an emoji
picker for ages. My wife and I started by letting her use WhatsApp’s emoji
picker to send us messages, but that quickly polluted our chat history with
emoji spam. We tried a few dedicated emoji-only apps like Emojichat, but there
was this uncertainty about how they handled data. Most of them were also 1:1
only. I wanted the three of us in the same room.

[IMAGE: https://blog.omgmog.net/images/2026-01/emoji.png]

I built Moji (https://moji-frontend.fly.dev/) over a weekend to see what happens
when everything gets stripped down. Emoji only. No accounts. Rooms are just URLs
with random IDs. Messages sync peer-to-peer and persist in browser storage.

The constraints are simple. Emoji only - the app only allows non-alphanumeric
characters. Random room IDs get generated when starting a chat, but any string
works. No accounts means nothing to store, nothing to manage. Type a name when
joining and that’s it.

I used GunDB (https://gun.eco) for peer-to-peer messaging so messages stay
between whoever’s in the room, not on my server or in the cloud. The frontend is
React, using Vite and Tailwind. The relay server is just Express with GunDB,
about 15 lines - it only helps peers find each other.

I deployed both to Fly.io (https://fly.io). Frontend as a static site, relay as
a separate app. The free tier covers what I need, and deployment is just fly
deploy. Didn’t have to think about it much.

She picked it up immediately. No explanation needed. She doesn’t just send
single emoji back and forth - she builds little narratives. A sequence of emoji
that tells a story. Sometimes it makes sense. Sometimes it doesn’t. She’ll
periodically ping me messages throughout the day when she has screen time and
I’m working in another room.

[IMAGE: https://blog.omgmog.net/images/2026-01/moji-app.png]

Emoji render differently across devices. The picker shows one set of glyphs, but
messages display in whatever the system provides. I tried using Twemoji to keep
things consistent but gave up - too much overhead. Works fine for now.

Messages are stored locally in browser storage, so there’s no central database.
Nothing to archive, nothing to moderate, nothing to maintain. I don’t worry
about what she’s sending or who might see it.

It’s live at https://moji-frontend.fly.dev/ and works as a PWA. Source is on
GitHub (https://github.com/omgmog/moji-emoji-chat). She uses it occasionally -
her interest is sporadic, as with most things 6-year-olds do. It’s not her go-to
when she has screen time, but it’s been fun watching her use it.

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Published January 12, 2026

Generated from the original post:
https://blog.omgmog.net/post/emoji-only-chat/


Max Glenister is an interface designer and senior full-stack developer from
Oxfordshire. He writes mostly about front-end development and technology.

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