Why there is no Northern Ireland flag next to the other three
🏴 England, 🏴 Scotland and 🏴 Wales arrived in 2017 as tag sequences: a black flag followed by invisible letters spelling gbeng, gbsct or gbwls. The same system could spell gbnir, but no such flag has been approved, and Northern Ireland's last official flag lost that status in 1973. Our 2026-10-18 check found no artwork for gbnir in Apple's, Google's, Twemoji's or OpenMoji's set. Phones that do not support the three British flags at all fall back to a plain 🏴, so if a Scotland flag arrives black, the sender's device was fine and yours is out of date.
Nordic and French flags that are the same picture
Several European codes point at territories that fly someone else's flag, and the emoji sets draw them as exact copies. In our 2026-10-18 comparison 🇸🇯 Svalbard & Jan Mayen was identical to 🇳🇴 Norway in all four sets, and Apple and Google also reuse it for 🇧🇻 Bouvet Island. 🇫🇷 France appears three times: as itself, as 🇲🇫 St. Martin and as 🇨🇵 Clipperton Island. OpenMoji adds two copies the others avoid: its 🇲🇨 Monaco is the same image as 🇮🇩 Indonesia, and its 🇷🇴 Romania matches 🇹🇩 Chad. Both pairs really are near twins; Monaco's flag is just a slightly different shape from Indonesia's.
UK, GB and the codes that are not what you would guess
The United Kingdom's flag is 🇬🇧, spelled G plus B, because GB is its ISO code. Typing the regional letters U and K gives you two letters and no flag, since UK is only reserved, not assigned. 🇪🇺 works on the same reserved basis, and 🇽🇰 Kosovo uses XK, a code ISO set aside for private use that the European Commission adopted for Kosovo. Greece is GR, not GK, Switzerland is CH from its Latin name, and Germany is DE from Deutschland. For Eurovision and Euros posts, those three are the codes people most often type wrongly when building flags by hand.