What Are the New Emoji? A Guide to the Latest Unicode Additions
Every year, a small but influential organization called the Unicode Consortium approves a fresh batch of emoji that eventually make their way onto your phone, tablet, and computer. If you've noticed unfamiliar symbols appearing in your keyboard or wondering why some emoji show up as blank boxes on certain devices, understanding how the emoji release cycle works will clear a lot of that up.
How New Emoji Get Approved
Emoji don't just appear out of nowhere. The process starts with the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit that maintains the universal text encoding standard used by virtually every operating system and platform. Each year, they evaluate proposals submitted by anyone — companies, organizations, or individuals — and vote on which new characters to add to the official Unicode Standard.
Once approved, new emoji become part of a numbered Emoji version release (for example, Emoji 15.0, 15.1, 16.0). At that point, it's up to platform developers — Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Meta, and others — to design and ship their own visual interpretations of each approved character.
This is why a 🍄 mushroom emoji looks slightly different on an iPhone versus an Android device. The Unicode Consortium defines what the emoji represents; each platform decides how it looks.
What's New in Recent Emoji Releases
Emoji 15.1 introduced a range of additions focused on inclusivity and expression, including:
- Direction-facing variants of existing people emoji (faces turned left or right)
- A phoenix, a lime, a mushroom, and a brown mushroom
- Shaking/wobbling head gestures
- New family and couple combinations
Emoji 16.0, targeting release cycles from late 2024 onward, continues this pattern with additions that include a harp, a leafless tree, a shovel, fingerprint, and several new face expressions. Exact availability depends on when your OS and app platforms roll out their updates.
It's worth noting: Unicode approval and device availability are two different things. An emoji can be officially approved but still show as a blank square (□) or question mark on your device if your operating system hasn't updated its emoji font yet.
Where New Emoji Actually Show Up
The path from Unicode approval to your keyboard involves several layers:
| Layer | Who Controls It | What It Affects |
|---|---|---|
| Unicode Standard | Unicode Consortium | Which emoji exist at all |
| OS Emoji Font | Apple, Google, Microsoft | Visual design and availability on-device |
| App Support | WhatsApp, Slack, Twitter/X, etc. | Whether an app renders or substitutes emoji |
| Keyboard App | Default or third-party keyboards | Whether emoji appear in your picker |
This layered system explains a common frustration: you might send a new emoji to someone and they receive a blank box or a completely different image because their device hasn't updated yet.
Why Some People See New Emoji Before Others 🕐
Operating system version is the single biggest factor in whether new emoji are available to you. Apple typically ships new emoji support with major iOS and macOS updates. Google follows a similar pattern with Android releases, though timing varies across device manufacturers.
If you're running an older OS version, you may not see recently approved emoji at all — or you'll see a text description in brackets like [face with bags under eyes] in place of the actual image.
A few variables that determine your emoji experience:
- Device age — older hardware may not receive the latest OS updates
- Update frequency — users who delay system updates often miss new emoji for months
- Platform ecosystem — iOS and Android have different release schedules
- App-specific rendering — some apps (especially web-based ones) render emoji using their own image sets, independent of your OS
The Difference Between Unicode Emoji and Platform-Specific Ones
Some emoji-like images you see in apps — especially on platforms like Slack, Discord, or messaging apps — aren't Unicode emoji at all. They're custom stickers or platform emoji that only work within that specific app. These can look far more detailed or animated than standard Unicode emoji, but they won't transfer meaningfully to other platforms.
Unicode emoji are the ones that work universally across text messages, emails, documents, and platforms — because they're encoded as standardized text characters, not images.
How to Know Which Emoji Your Device Supports
The most reliable way to check is through Emojipedia (emojipedia.org), which maintains up-to-date lists of every approved emoji, which Unicode version they belong to, and how each platform has rendered them. Searching by emoji version (e.g., "Emoji 16.0") shows exactly what's new and which platforms have shipped support.
You can also check your device's OS update notes — Apple and Google typically call out new emoji explicitly in release changelogs.
The Variables That Shape Your Experience
Whether the newest emoji are available to you, and whether recipients see what you intended, comes down to a combination of your OS version, device model, the platform or app you're communicating through, and what software the person on the other end is running.
Two people using "current" devices can still have mismatched emoji experiences if one is on iOS and the other on an older Android build — or if one is using a web app that hasn't pushed an update yet. The emoji standard is universal; the rollout is anything but.