iOS 26 is getting new emojis, but don’t expect to see them right away
Apple's UI refresh, iOS 26, is almost here. To mark the recently passed World Emoji Day on July 16, the Unicode Consortium has approved a fresh batch of emojis for the update.
For context, the Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit that maintains the Unicode Standard, a universal character encoding system that ensures text and emoji appear consistently across all platforms and devices. In other words, it's not Apple or Google that decides which emoji make the cut, but the Consortium itself. This time around, nine new emoji have been selected for Unicode 17.0.
The new additions are:
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Before you get too excited, these likely won’t appear in the initial rollout of iOS 26. Apple typically takes its time designing its own custom versions of new emojis, and those designs usually arrive a few updates down the line. For example, Unicode 16.0 was finalized on September 10, 2024 — just a week before iOS 18 launched. But that emoji set didn’t show up on iPhones until the release of iOS 18.4 in March of this year.
So while iOS 26 is coming soon, expect the new emoji to follow a few months later.
Topics Apple
Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father. His writing has also appeared in PC Mag and Mother Jones.
In his free time, he cooks, loves to sleep, and greatly enjoys Detroit sports. If you have any tips or want to talk shop about the Lions, you can reach out to him on Bluesky @offbrandchance.bsky.social or by email at [email protected].
