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 gender neural families.
There’s also more than 100 people facing sideways in a range of skin colours and genders, including some holding canes and others in wheelchairs.
The new emoji will be available on Apple devices with the latest iOS update – iOS 17.4 – which is due in the spring.
It’ll 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’s also a phoenix, a brown mushroom and a metal chain being broken and smileys shaking their heads up and down
Emojipedia – which is part of the Unicode Consortium, the central bank of all approved emoji – approved the new emoji release – called 15.1.
‘The new emojis in today’s beta release are drawn from Unicode’s September 2023 recommendations – Emoji 15.1,’ said Keith Broni, editor in chief of Emojipedia.
‘Based on past iOS beta history it’s likely that the final public release of iOS 17.4 will come to users in March or April 2024.’
The draft list of new emoji was approved back in September, but now Emojipedia has published the first look at Apple designs that will come to iOS.
Companies apply stylised 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 figures on a grey 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 nearly every human emoji, ranging from merpeople to chefs.
Revealed: The four new non-gender-specifying family emojis, specific to Apple’s operating system (iOS)
Samsung’s designs (pictured) are slightly different from Apple’s. For example, Samsung’s chain is thicker, while its lime looks more cartoonish
Other differences are noticeable when looking at Samsung’s versions of the new emoji.
For example, Samsung’s chain is thicker, while its lime looks less realistic and more cartoonish than Apple’s.
Apple’s phoenix, meanwhile, is facing sideways rather than forward and has more detail on its wings.
The vast majority of the 118 new emoji is made up of new direction-specifying versions of six existing people emojis, in a range of genders and skin tones.
The six existing people emojis are person walking sideways, person kneeling, person with cane, person in motorized wheelchair, person in manual wheelchair and person running.
Notably, the new list includes no flag emojis – not only geographical flags, but also pride flags, language flags and other colour-based flags.
Pictured, Apple’s new direction-specifying versions of six existing people emojis. These amount to 108 new emojis when the numerous gender and skin tone variations are accounted for
A decision to create no more flag emojis was revealed earlier this year, due to the ‘transient nature’ of many pride flags, and the ‘challenges including some identities while excluding others’, Emojipedia said.
Looking forward, the next batch of emoji is likely to be revealed in the summer and approved in September before a release in 2025.
To be considered, the candidate emoji must have multiple uses, use in sequences, break new ground, be distinctive, be compatible and be frequently used, according to Unicode Consortium.
In the past, Emojipedia has previously revealed new emoji around the time of World Emoji Day – July 17 – so it’s likely that the next batch will be announced then.
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk