Five codes that are not on the ISO list
Most flags here are spelled with a country's official two-letter ISO code, so 🇰🇪 is K plus E. Five are not. AC for Ascension, TA for Tristan da Cunha, DG for Diego Garcia, IC for the Canary Islands and EA for Ceuta & Melilla are codes ISO keeps in reserve for specific uses, and Unicode allowed them as flags anyway. That is why the Canary Islands, an autonomous community of Spain, has its own emoji while Spain's other regions do not.
African flags your phone draws as a copy of another
We compared the flag images Apple, Google, Twitter/X and OpenMoji ship on 2026-10-18. 🇪🇦 Ceuta & Melilla is the same image as 🇪🇸 Spain in all four sets, since both cities fly the Spanish flag. 🇩🇬 Diego Garcia matches 🇮🇴 British Indian Ocean Territory on Apple, Google and Twitter/X. Apple goes further than anyone else with the South Atlantic: 🇸🇭 St. Helena, 🇦🇨 Ascension Island and 🇹🇦 Tristan da Cunha are one identical picture, while Google draws three different flags. OpenMoji has the oddest result: its 🇹🇩 Chad is pixel-for-pixel the same as 🇷🇴 Romania. The real flags differ only in the shade of blue, and at emoji size OpenMoji does not attempt the difference.
Picking the right flag for diaspora and football posts
The two Congos are the classic mix-up. 🇨🇩 is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, capital Kinshasa, with a red diagonal and a yellow star on blue. 🇨🇬 is the Republic of the Congo, capital Brazzaville, split diagonally in green, yellow and red. Guinea, 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau and 🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea are three separate countries on two sides of the continent, and 🇳🇪 Niger is not 🇳🇬 Nigeria. During the Africa Cup of Nations these are the flags that get swapped most in match threads. Eswatini's 🇸🇿 kept its code SZ when the country dropped the name Swaziland in 2018, so older keyboards may still list it under S for Swaziland.