The list of fresh emoji up for consideration includes a tired-looking face, a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a harp and several more.
If approved, they’ll be added to iPhone, Mac and iPad as well as many social media applications.
Emoji 16.0 are on the way
Emoji make our texts and emails more fun, but they also serve a purpose. 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 the proposed additions to Emoji 16.0 on Wednesday. This gives the world its first look at possible upcoming new emoji.
In addition to face with bags under eyes and the other already mentioned, the proposed list includes a radish, a shovel and a splat.
Might debut this autumn in iOS 18, macOS 15
The Unicode Consortium made reference designs, 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 add them to iPhone, iPad, etc. Given the timing, and the generally slow approval process, the proposed Emoji 10.0 additions will go into iOS 18 and macOS 15 this fall. Or winter 2025 at the latest.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
