The movie takes place in a world where Emojis and apps are alive and sentient, but there are a lot more differences between its phones and ours, most of which are required for the plot to happen as it does.
- In the climax, Alex is able to stop the factory reset process mid-way, a feat impossible under normal circumstances unless you somehow force it, which it's probably the last thing you would want to do because of the huge chance that your phone could be damaged and turn into an expensive brick. The Emojis could still be recovered later on, as phones lack the capacity to delete their data.
- The main conflict is that Alex needs to take his phone to a store to get it factory reset when that's a basic
feature of most phones. The only reason someone would need outside help to perform one is if they didn't know the option existed at all, and Alex explicitly knows what a factory reset is, but still books an appointment at the store for the sake of providing the Emojis a time limit to complete their journey instead of just immediately ending the movie in an anticlimactic Downer Ending. - As noted by more than a few reviewers, smartphones do not have firewalls.
- Emojis are not confined to SMS apps like the film seems to imply. All they are are blocks of Unicode, meaning that to a computer there is no difference between a 😒 and an 'A', and can be placed anywhere that has a text field.
- The princess emojis look nothing like their mobile counterparts.
- The main plot point of "Emojis can only convey one emotion" is not exactly true. Plenty of emojis have been used to express different things, either ironically or unintentionally (the eggplant emoji being a popular example of this). Yes, there's a lot of emojis that only have one meaning and are solely used for that meaning, but it's far from what the movie seems to portray.
- Dropbox is far from "malware-free" like the movie states. Not saying they don't have procedures to prevent it from happening, but still.
- The emoji are able to interact with Internet trolls, which are sent to the phone's recycle bin, implying that they are purely data on Alex's phone. In real life, a troll is a person who behaves poorly on social media just to get a rise out of people.
- There's no such thing as a "hacker" emoji, and there's no equivalent. This is Foreshadowing to Jailbreak actually being a princess emoji.
- One scene has Poop punching a fan emoji. Again, there's no such emoji.
- Just Dance characters have a very distinct style, which Akiko Glitter looks nothing like. For one, they don't have faces◊.
- Smartphones do not use Recycle Bins for file deletion. It's much more streamlined.
- The graphics (or "code", as the movie calls it) for each Emoji is part of the phone, and stays on the phone rather than being sent through messages. What is sent is a bit of unicode that the phone displays as its own version of the Emoji, which, in real life, leads to Emojis looking completely different depending on what device they're displayed on. This means that even though Gene made the wrong face while being added to Alex's message, it shouldn't matter because Addie would have seen the Meh Emoji from her phone, not Alex's. The most realistic consequence of Gene's malfunction would have been Alex mistaking Gene for a different Emoji and accidentally sending someone a "Meh" Emoji, causing his message to be misinterpreted.
