tl;dr Despite my settings and my movements (using text-only emoticons) Google Keyboard in my phone (realme GT 5G) keeps "throwing" graphical emoticons at me everywhere.
Is this a bug (introduced in Android 13, to which my phone was updated to yesterday) or Google policy to make using text-only emoticons as hard as possible? Is there anything I can do about this?
Today I have noticed a very weird behavior of my Google Keyboard. Somebody or something is trying to force me to use graphical emoticons (which I personally hate) and to make using text ones (which I favor) as hard as possible.
First of all, even though I am using text-only emoticons, each time I long-press emoticons button to open emoticons bar, I see the graphic ones:
In other words the above screenshots shows that Google Keyboard claims that it shows me recently used emoticons (the clock icon checked), but this turns out to be not true. Because all the time I see emoticons that I haven't been using for ages (some of them -- never).
Being force to switch to text tab each time I want to paste a text emoticon sounds like a madness.
Second of all, I have checked a configuration switch to have additional bar with recently used emoticons shown directly in keyboard. And, again, I am all the time presented with graphical emoticons only. That I was supposedly used recently. Even though (as you can clearly see below) I am again using text-only emoticons.
My phone was updated to Android 13 yesterday and I have noticed this weird (to me) behaviour this morning. Could these two things stand in common?
Can someone replicate the above described problem? Is this a bug or some recent "change in policy"? Maybe someone at Google or Android dev team hates text-only emoticons? And they've decided to make using them as hard as possible.
