Apple’s next iPhone update is bringing a handful of new emoji along with it.
The additions appeared this week in the fourth developer beta of iOS 26.4, the latest refinement to the “Liquid Glass” redesign Apple launched last fall. This means they’ll likely arrive for everyone once the update rolls out publicly. As usual, the characters come from the Unicode Consortium, the group that decides which emojis become part of the global standard used across iPhones, Android phones, and other platforms.
Eight new icons are part of this batch.
Among them are ballet dancers, a distorted face, a cartoon-style fight cloud, a hairy creature (think Bigfoot or Sasquatch), a landslide, an orca, a trombone, and a treasure chest. Anyone running the beta can already find them in the keyboard.
How Digital Symbols Become Standard
For the uninitiated, Apple doesn’t design emojis entirely on its own. Each year, Unicode reviews proposals submitted by designers, companies, and members of the public. Once the organization approves a new set, companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft create their own versions and ship them in software updates.
That process happened last summer for the new group of emojis, but they’re only now beginning to show up on devices.
Even with Apple pushing custom features like Genmoji, which lets users generate personalized emoji with Apple Intelligence, the official Unicode characters still matter. Because they’re standardized, they display properly across messaging apps and different operating systems.
In other words, if someone sends an orca emoji from an iPhone, it should appear as an orca on an Android phone too, even if the design style looks slightly different.
The release also offers a glimpse of what could arrive next year. Early candidates being discussed for iOS 27-era emoji include directional thumbs gestures, a meteor, an eraser, and a new smiling face with tightly squinting eyes. The proposals still need approval, so the final list is not set in stone.
For now, the iOS 26.4 set is relatively small compared with some past years. But it continues the slow expansion of the emoji keyboard—a collection that has grown from a few hundred symbols in the early smartphone era to well over 3,000 characters today.
Once iOS 26.4 leaves beta testing, the new icons should appear automatically on supported iPhones as part of the system update.
Sources: Unicode Consortium, Emojipedia, 9to5mac