By Julie Clover
Every year, the Unicode Consortium selects new emoji characters to appear on smartphones and other devices in the future, and this week, Unicode released recommendations for 17 emoji [PDF].
Eight new emoji characters have been proposed, including a hairy creature (like Bigfoot), a distorted face, a battle cloud, an apple core, a killer whale, a trombone, a landslide, and a treasure chest. There are also skin tone variations for a number of existing emoji, like the ballet dancer, people with bunny ears, and people wrestling.
The Unicode Consortium has created mockups of what the emoji might look like, with images provided by Emojipedia. It’s important to note that the Unicode Consortium is only developing the base emoji code, and Apple designers will create their own Apple-style version of each character once the Unicode 17 standard is finalized.
Unicode 17 will likely be approved next fall, though it will take time for Apple to implement the new characters. We could see them around spring 2026 if Apple sticks to its typical emoji release schedule.
In 2025, Apple will introduce the Unicode 16 characters, which were approved in September 2024. Unicode 16 emoji include face with bags under the eyes, fingerprint, leafless tree, root vegetable, harp, shovel, and splash.
Apple last introduced new emoji in the iOS 17.4 update, released in March 2024. The symbols added in iOS 17.4 include lime, edible brown mushroom, phoenix, broken chain, vertical head shake (as if nodding “yes”), and horizontal head shake (as if nodding “no”).
With iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2, Apple will introduce Genmoji for devices that support Apple Intelligence. Genmoji is a customizable version of emoji that is generated based on a phrase entered by the user. Genmoji behave like emoji on Apple devices, but are not cross-platform and do not display as emoji characters on Android devices.
Tag: Emoji[ 71 comments ]
