In a digital world inside the smartphone of a teenager named Alex, emojis live and work in Textopolis, a bustling city where each emoji has a single facial expression, except for Gene, who is supposed to be a "meh" emoji like his parents, but has the ability to express multiple emotions. Gene desperately wants to become "normal" to avoid being deleted, so he can fulfill his role in the text conversations of his user, Alex. On his first day on the job, Gene panics and makes the wrong face, causing chaos in the phone's texting app. As a result, he is labeled as a malfunction and the threat of deletion looms over him.

Gene seeks the help of Hi-5, a once-popular emoji who has since fallen out of favor, and Jailbreak, a savvy hacker emoji with dreams of escaping to the cloud. The trio embarks on an adventure through the various apps of the smartphone to find the source code that will fix Gene. Meanwhile, Alex's frustration with the malfunctioning phone grows, prompting him to consider a factory reset, which would mean the death of all the emojis within. As Gene and his new friends race against time to change his fate, they also come to realize that being different might not be such a bad thing after all.