The list of new emoji up for approval includes a phoenix, a breaking chain, a lime, a person nodding or shaking their head, plus a handful more.
These are being proposed to the Unicode Consortium in September, but are very unlikely to appear on iPhone and other computers before 2024.
Fun new emoji for 2024
Emoji make our texts and emails more fun, but they serve a purpose, too. The emotions behind simple text messages can sometimes be hard for the reader to interpret, and adding an emoji brings context. (Just don’t use emoji that are confusing all on their own.)
The collection of these pictograms grows every year, and industry group Unicode Consortium revealed Emoji 15.1 on Thursday. This gives the world its first look at possible upcoming new emoji.
Other additions to the list include a brown mushroom plus multiple gender-neutral family groupings.
The proposal also includes direction-swapped versions of people walking, running, etc. These are already emoji but all face left — the new versions face right.
A long approval process
Emojipedia created images for all the proposed additions in Emoji 15.1, but these aren’t the final ones. The Unicode Consortium will make its own reference designs for any new pictograms it approves. But even these won’t be the final versions. It will be up to Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and other companies to design the versions their software will use.
These companies can make their own emoji designs, but can’t dream up and introduce emoji on their own. These have to be approved by the Unicode Consortium.
The process of proposing and approving emoji is complex but necessary because devices don’t send pictures to each other — they send Unicode numbers. It’s up to each device to turn the number into a picture. So the sender and receiver must agree on what those Unicode numbers represent.
Once the Unicode Consortium makes the final decision, Apple will design its versions and then build them into future versions of iOS, macOS, etc. Based on previous experience, this likely will take until 2024. The ones approved in autumn 2022 appeared in March 2023, for example.
