Apple’s UI refresh, iOS 26, is almost here. In honor of the recently adopted World Emoji Day on July 16, the Unicode consortium has approved a batch of new emojis for updates.
For context, Unicode Alliance is a nonprofit that maintains Unicode standards, a universal character encoding system that ensures text and emojis are consistent across all platforms and devices. In other words, it’s not Apple or Google that decides the emoji promotion, but the consortium itself. This time, eight new emojis have been selected for Unicode 17.0.
New additions are:
Mixable light speed
-
Apple Core
-
Ballet dancer
-
A distorted face
-
Battle Cloud
-
Furry creature
-
Orca
-
Trombone
-
Treasure box
Credit: Unicode Consortium/Emoji
These probably won’t be in the initial launch of iOS 26 until you’re too excited. Apple usually spends time designing its own custom version of new emojis, which are often updated online. For example, Unicode 16.0 was completed on September 10, 2024, just a week before iOS 18 was launched. But the emoji suite didn’t appear on the iPhone until the release of iOS 18.4 in March this year.
So when iOS 26 is coming, hopefully new emojis will follow in a few months.
