Bigfoot, Apple Cores, Dancers, and Trombones | The New Emoji Coming to iOS 19
Credit: Emojipedia
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It’s that time of the year again. No, not Apple’s holiday shopping season — although that recently kicked off, too — but the time when we start seeing the new emoji characters the Unicode Consortium has in store for next year’s release.
While we have yet to see the sleepy faces and leafless trees slated for a later iOS 18 release, the Consortium’s subcommittee that manages emoji — known formally as the Emoji Standard & Research Working Group — has already unveiled its draft proposals for the glyphs that will eventually make their way into iOS 19.
As Keith Broni of Emojipedia reports, the subcommittee has proposed 164 emojis as part of the Unicode 17 specification. However, before you get too excited, it’s important to remember that many of these are variations on existing emoji. For example, the last big emoji update in iOS 17.4 boasted 115 emojis, but only half a dozen of these were even close to being new glyphs. The vast majority were flipped, right-facing versions of existing emojis of people walking, running, kneeling, and in wheelchairs.
So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the same holds true with the Unicode 17 batch. There appear to be about nine uniquely new emojis proposed, including a hairy creature that resembles Big Foot, an apple core, a ballet dancer, an orca, a trombone, a rockslide, a treasure chest, and a slightly more abstract “fight cloud” symbol.
The ballet dancer will represent five of the 164 proposed emoji, as it will be rendered in five skin tones, which are technically discrete characters. The other 150 new emojis are skin tone variations for the existing People With Bunny Earsand People Wrestling emojis.
The reason there are so many new entries for only two core emoji is the sheer number of permutations and combinations involved in applying five different skin tones to a glyph that contains two people and is already rendered in three possible genders. Unlike the Couple with Heart and Kissemojis, the two people in the bunny ears and wrestling emojis share the same gender, but they won’t be sharing the same skin tones in Unicode 17.
Notably, the proposal doesn’t suggest creating gender variations of the new ballet dancer emoji either, which is why only five skin tones are needed.
When Are These New Emojis Coming?
The Unicode Consortium and Emoji Working Group only specify the design of each emoji. It’s up to each platform developer to interpret those specs with their own unique designs. Even the illustration above is only Emojipedia’s idea of what the proposed emojis could ultimately look like.
Apple usually puts its own unique spin on these. For example, the lime wedge that appeared in iOS 17.4 was initially envisioned as a solid lime. Apple also typically renders all hardware emojis using its products: the Headphone emoji uses AirPods Max, the Mobile Phone Emoji is clearly an iPhone, and the Laptop, Man Technologist, and Female Technologist emojis clearly show a MacBook, complete with a tiny Apple logo.
The draft proposal is unlikely to be approved until September 2025, which means it will arrive too late for the initial iOS 19.0 release. If Apple follows its usual cycle, we’ll probably see it on our iPhones in early 2026. Apple’s designers are also much more meticulous about crafting unique emojis, which might explain why they take longer to appear.
