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, eight new emoji have been selected for Unicode 17.0.

The new additions are:

• Apple Core

• Ballet Dancers

• Distorted Face

• Fight Cloud

• Hairy Creature

• Orca

• Trombone

• Treasure Chest

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.