The Unicode 17 specification brings new emoji like Bigfoot, a fight cloud and orca, but Apple definitely won’t bring them to the iPhone and other devices before 2026.
The Unicode Consortium announced today new emoji that will make their way to your keyboards, including Trombone, Treasure Chest, Distorted Face, Hairy Creature (aka Bigfoot), Fight Cloud (as seen in cartoons and comic books), Apple Core, Orca (aka killer whale) and Ballet Dancers.
“These new emoji have long-standing symbolic meanings, are visually distinctive, and contain multitudes of expression,” reads the announcement. These fun emoticons were first drafted in November 2024.
Other changes in Unicode 17 include new skin tone sequences for the existing people with bunny ears and people wrestling emoji. Selecting a skin tone is a feature that some emoji support, like the hand emoji. If an emoji supports this feature, touch and hold it on the emoji keyboard to select a skin tone.
Apple will add the new Unicode 17 emoji to iOS 26 next year
While the new emoji characters will be officially available this fall, don’t expect Apple to add them to the initial versions of iOS 26 and the other “26” operating systems scheduled to launch this fall.
That’s because big platforms like iOS, Android and Windows need time to implement newly certified emoji in their own design style. If history is anything to go by, don’t expect the new Unicode 17 emoji to appear until an iOS 26 update around the spring of next year. It will most likely be iOS 26.3 in March or iOS 26.4 in April.
Happy World Emoji Day!
Today is World Emoji Day. If you haven’t heard about it, that’s because World Emoji Day is an unofficial holiday intended to celebrate the emoji. Many brands time their product releases or other emoji-related announcements to coincide with World Emoji Day. For example, Apple has moved the release of Emoji Game on Apple News to coincide with World Emoji Day instead of the original plan to launch the game alongside iOS 26 in the fall.
The development of new emoji characters is in the exclusive domain of the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit that develops and maintains Unicode. Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that enables devices to process and display text correctly, no matter the language or platform, which includes emoji characters.