Mobile chat: Emoji rendering on iOS + raise character limit

[ArbipeR]

Hello Lichess team,

I’ve noticed two limitations in the Lichess chat on the mobile app:

Emoji support on iOS
On iOS, emojis in the chat are currently not displayed properly. I’m not sure how this behaves on Android, but on iOS devices it makes the chat feel a bit limited compared to other apps where emojis are supported by default.

Message length limit
The current character limit in chat is quite restrictive. This often forces users to send multiple short messages instead of one longer one. From a resource perspective, sending a single longer message should not be worse than sending several short ones — in fact, it may even be slightly more efficient since it avoids multiple requests and events. For the user experience it would be more convenient to have a higher character limit (e.g. doubling the current limit).

Proposal:

Ensure emoji characters are correctly displayed in iOS chat.

Increase the maximum character limit for chat messages.

I think these changes would improve usability without significant downsides.

Thanks for considering!