She brought diverse skin tones emoji to the iPhone. Now she’s suing Apple.
Katrina Parrott, a Black mother in Texas, created an iPhone app so her daughter could express herself. But after helping Apple, she claims, the company left her high and dry.
By Reed Albergotti
March 10, 2021
For Katrina Parrott, being invited to present her idea to Apple at its campus in Cupertino, Calif., felt like a dream. Less than a year earlier, she had been laid off from her job with NASA in Texas. Now, she was discussing partnering with the iPhone maker on an idea she had pioneered: emoji with different skin-tone options.
It was 2013, and the tiny digital drawings — smiley faces and thumbs-up icons sent over text message — depicted people in only one skin tone. Parrott, who is Black, said her oldest daughter came home from college one day and lamented that she couldn’t express herself through emoji with skin tones that matched her own.
“What I learned in business is if you come up with an idea that nobody else has and you’re the first on the scene, it gives you a real good opportunity to be successful,” Parrott said in an interview.
Parrott embraced the idea and in six months built and launched iDiversicons, an iPhone app that allowed users to copy and paste emoji with five distinct skin tones into their messages. At the time, creators of iPhone apps were becoming millionaires overnight, and Parrott saw an opportunity to build momentum. She began pumping her savings into the app’s growth.
According to Parrott, though, her early success turned to heartbreak when Apple and other technology companies incorporated skin tone options into their operating systems, making her app obsolete and leaving her $200,000 in the hole.
Parrott is now suing Apple for copyright infringement in a case that highlights the lopsided power dynamic on mobile app stores, where app creators are easily copied and pushed aside by technology giants. Todd Patterson, an intellectual property lawyer in Texas who is representing Parrott, said the case is about simple values. “The woman who was trying to improve inclusion gets excluded,” he said.
Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy declined to comment, other than to point to the company’s court filings, in which Apple says Parrott has no claim to the copyright of skin tone emoji. In court, Apple’s lawyers have argued that “copyright does not protect the idea of applying five different skin tones to emoji because ideas are not copyrightable.” Apple said in the court filing that it developed diverse skin tone emoji independently and did not copy her work.
Washington Post