It’s that time of year again! The Unicode Consortium has released a preview of new emoji that will likely be included in a version of iOS 18 later this year or early next year. It will be up to Apple to officially add them to the next iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, and visionOS versions.
The new emoji announced today include ones for a sleepy face, fingerprint, leafless tree, vegetable root, harp, shovel, and splatter. The emoji examples provided by Unicode serve as starting points for Apple designers to create finished designs and are not the final images Apple will use. Google and other platform users will also work with these emoji as a starting point.
If past practice is followed again, Apple won’t release the new emoji with the first version of iOS 18. Instead, we should expect them to arrive in a future version, such as iOS 18.3 or iOS 18.4. The most recent list of new emoji, announced last year, was released with iOS 17.4 in March.
The earliest emoji appeared in the 1980s, but didn’t become popular until the early 21st century. In the 2010s, they gained international popularity with the arrival of the Unicode Standard, which ensures consistent encoding across different devices and platforms. Today, emoji are a significant part of popular culture that constantly evolve with new additions and variations.
Apple is expected to announce new versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and visionOS on Monday, June 10, at the keynote address that kicks off this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
