The 118 new emoji coming to your iPhone in iOS 17.4 – including a lime, a shaking head and four gender-neutral families
The new emoji coming to your iPhone later this year have finally been revealed.
Among them are a lime, a phoenix, a brown mushroom, a broken metal chain, two shaking heads and four sex neural families.
There are also more than 100 side-facing people of varying skin colors and genders, including some with canes and others in wheelchairs.
The new emoji will be available on Apple devices with the latest iOS update – iOS 17.4 – due in the spring.
It will be a follow-up to iOS 17.3, which was released earlier this month, with security fixes for more than a dozen bugs.
A lime, a shaking head and four gender neural families are among the new emoji available on Apple devices with the latest iOS update. There is also a phoenix, a brown mushroom and a metal chain being broken and smileys shaking their heads up and down
Emojipedia – part of the Unicode Consortium, the central bank of all approved emoji – has approved the new emoji release, called 15.1.
“The new emojis in today’s beta are from the September 2023 Unicode Recommendations – Emoji 15.1,” said Keith Broni, editor-in-chief of Emojipedia.
“Based on the history of the iOS beta, it is likely that the final public release of iOS 17.4 will be available to users in March or April 2024.”
The draft list of new emoji was approved in September, but now Emojipedia has published the first look at Apple designs coming to iOS.
Companies are applying stylized versions of the new emoji designs to their own operating systems – including Samsung and Google, as well as Apple.
As Apple’s emoji designs show, the four gender neural families take the form of silhouettes, similar to the existing ‘Bust in Silhouette’ and ‘Busts in Silhouette’.
Apple’s gender neural family emojis are white on a light blue background, while rival Samsung has black numbers on a gray background.
They consist of two parents and a child, one parent and two children, one parent and one child, and two parents and two children.
Since 2019, Apple has offered iPhone users non-binary versions of almost every human emoji, ranging from merpeople to chefs.
Revealed: the four new non-gender specific family emojis specific to Apple’s operating system (iOS)
Samsung’s designs (photo) differ slightly from Apple’s. For example, Samsung’s chain is thicker, while the lime one looks more cartoonish
Other differences are noticeable when you look at Samsung’s versions of the new emoji.
For example, Samsung’s chain is thicker, while the lime looks less realistic and more cartoonish than Apple’s.
Apple’s phoenix, meanwhile, faces sideways instead of forward and has more detail on its wings.
The vast majority of the 118 new emoji are new game-changing versions of six existing human emojis, across a range of genders and skin tones.
The six existing human emojis are a person walking sideways, a kneeling person, a person with a cane, a person in a motorized wheelchair, a person in a manual wheelchair and a running person.
Notably, the new list does not include flag emojis – not just geographic flags, but also pride flags, language flags, and other color-based flags.
Pictured: Apple’s new game-changing versions of six existing human emojis. This amounts to 108 new emojis when the numerous gender and skin color variations are taken into account
Earlier this year, the decision to stop creating flag emojis was revealed due to the “temporary nature” of many pride flags and the “challenges of including some identities and excluding others,” according to Emojipedia.
Looking ahead, the next batch of emoji will likely be unveiled in the summer and approved in September before being released in 2025.
To qualify, the candidate emoji must have multiple uses, be used in series, break new ground, be distinctive, be compatible and be used extensively, according to the Unicode Consortium.
In the past, Emojipedia has previously revealed new emoji around the time of World Emoji Day (July 17), so it’s likely the next batch will be announced then.
‘Pregnant man’ included in emoji list 14.0
Two emoji – ‘pregnant man’ and a gender-neutral ‘pregnant person’ – were among the 14.0 list of approved emojis coming to devices in 2021 and 2022.
The pregnant man and pregnant person recognize that “pregnancy is possible for some transgender men and non-binary people,” says Emojipedia, a voting member of the Unicode Consortium.
Men get pregnant in both real life and fiction, Emojipedia argued, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1994 film “Junior.”
Emoji ‘Pregnant man’ and ‘pregnant person’ can also be used as ‘an ironic way to represent a food baby, a very full stomach caused by eating a large meal
Guidelines to use the term ‘pregnant person’ instead of ‘pregnant woman’ – as issued by the British Medical Association in 2017, in a bid to recognize trans and non-binary people – were called ‘an insult to women’ at the time .
Jane Solomon, Emojipedia’s ‘senior emoji lexicographer’, sketched the new emoji in a blog post entitled ‘Why is there an emoji for a pregnant man?’
“The new maternity options can be used for representation by trans men, non-binary people or women with short hair – although the use of this emoji is obviously not limited to these groups,” she said.
‘Men can be pregnant. This applies to the real world (e.g. trans men) and to fictional universes (e.g. Arnold Schwarzenegger in (1994 film) “Junior”.
‘People of any gender can also be pregnant. Now there are emojis that represent this.”
For now, Unicode is keeping the more conventional “pregnant woman” emoji, which has been an emoji since 2016.