Google CEO makes fixing hamburger emoji his top priority

Do you have strong feelings about cheeseburgers? I didn't realize I did until I saw the following tweet over the weekend:

I think we need to have a discussion about how Google's burger emoji is placing the cheese underneath the burger, while Apple puts it on top pic.twitter.com/PgXmCkY3Yc — Thomas Baekdal (@baekdal) October 28, 2017

Take a good hard look at the position of the ingredients in the emoji above.

Apple's ordering of the lettuce, presumably a variant of iceberg sourced from an Italian quarry, is understandable as a mechanism for preventing the lower bun from getting soggy. It’s the same approach taken by the In-N-Out chain.

Google's positioning of the cheese is blasphemous, simultaneously defying both culinary physics (how do you cook it to drip down the bun like that?) and good taste (it’ll result in a soggy doughy mess). It's so egregious that Google CEO Sundar Pichai took notice and promised to "drop everything" and address on Monday if folks can agree on what the correct ordering should be.

Will drop everything else we are doing and address on Monday:) if folks can agree on the correct way to do this! https://t.co/dXRuZnX1Ag — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) October 29, 2017

Should be simple enough. I mean, how hard can it be to get the internet to agree on something?

According to Emojipedia, the hamburger emoji, alternatively known as the cheeseburger for obvious reasons, was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Since then it's been up to each company to decide how it wants to render the two buns, meat patty, and cheese; usually lettuce and tomato, too; and rarely sauces like mayonnaise and ketchup.

Let's take a closer look at a few notable examples:

Microsoft's hamburger is the American archetype. Bun - salad - cheese - patty - bun exactly as Ronald McDonald intended. It's the Five Guys approach to the cheeseburger. It’s also the burger we imagine dad serving up on a hot summer's day, flanked by buttery corn on the cob and a pistol, because no gawdam Fed's gonna interfere with his 2nd amendment rights!

Just look at Samsung's emoji for a second. To create this monstrosity, you'd have to put the lettuce on top of the sizzling patty and then put on the cheese to melt it. Nobody does this because it’s insane. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Galaxy Note 7’s battery designer was responsible.

LG's cheeseburger is ideal for anyone like my colleague Sam Byford who hates tomatoes, because — let's be honest — a tomato cross section is still in its larval stage. LG's emoji is fine, it’s certainly less offensive than the LG Display screens found on the Pixel 2 XL and LG V30.

Look at this (symmetrical) madness from HTC. I call it the Wes Anderson burger. Like HTC, this emoji is largely ignored.

Having reviewed the respective emoji above, let’s now tap into the hive mind and vote for the proper top-to-bottom ordering of burger ingredients. It’s the least we can do to make Pichai’s decision a little bit easier today.

Poll Who best represents the burger emoji? Apple: tomato, cheese, patty, then lettuce

Google: lettuce, tomato, patty, then cheese

Microsoft: lettuce, tomato, cheese, then patty

Samsung: tomato, cheese, lettuce, then patty

HTC: cheese, patty, lettuce, then patty vote view results 39% Apple: tomato, cheese, patty, then lettuce (10062 votes)

5% Google: lettuce, tomato, patty, then cheese (1505 votes)

44% Microsoft: lettuce, tomato, cheese, then patty (11437 votes)

2% Samsung: tomato, cheese, lettuce, then patty (513 votes)

5% LG: lettuce, cheese, then patty (1431 votes)

2% HTC: cheese, patty, lettuce, then patty (622 votes) 25570 votes total Vote Now

And Pichai, sir, while you're at it, please explain this: