Emoji Coming to Future iOS 17 Update Include Shaking Head, Brown Mushroom, Lime, Phoenix and More

As Apple was announcing new iPhone models last week, the Unicode Consortium was officially approving new emoji characters that are set to be added to smartphones starting in 2024.

emojipedia 15 1 emoji

Mockup of new emoji from Emojipedia

Approved Unicode 15.1 emoji include phoenix, lime, an edible mushroom, shaking head vertically (as in a "yes" nod), shaking head horizontally (a "no" head shake), and broken chain.

There are four new family emoji combinations, along with updates to six people emoji that now have direction specifications such as facing right or facing left. The direction options can be used with person walking, person running, person kneeling, person with white cane, person in manual wheelchair, and person in motorized wheelchair.

Unicode updates often include quite a few emoji characters, so the 15.1 update is smaller in scale than a typical year. Unicode 15.1 does, however, add a number of new non-emoji characters for use in China.

Following the approval of new emoji characters, it takes smartphone makers like Apple several months to design artwork for the emoji and add them to iOS. We can expect to see the emoji updates in a future version of iOS 17.

Last year, Apple added new emoji to the iOS 16.4 update that was released in February 2023, so the company might follow a similar timeline in 2024. Last year's emoji additions included shaking face, pink heart, light blue heart, donkey, moose, goose, wing, jellyfish, hyacinth, pea pod, ginger, flute, maracas, and black bird.

Related Forums: iOS 17, iPadOS 17

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Top Rated Comments

chrono1081 Avatar
17 months ago
Friendly reminder Apple does NOT make the emojis, the Unicode Consortium does, Apple and others just have to adopt them or risk serious software bugs. Everytime there’s emoji posts someone gets angry because Apple didn’t do X thing and instead came out with new emojis.
Score: 28 Votes (Like | Disagree)
cocky jeremy Avatar
17 months ago
They're really going out of their way to make excuses to make more emojis at this point. I wish Apple would let us customize our main page in the emoji screen with our favorites instead of doing most recently used ones.
Score: 21 Votes (Like | Disagree)
macduke Avatar
17 months ago
They're adding a flippin phoenix before the chef's kiss emoji??

Preposterous.
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
compwiz1202 Avatar
17 months ago

Lime!

Always bothered me that it was missing.
So now we can do
(lime)
?
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
dugbug Avatar
17 months ago
I propose the emoji reduction act. Cut them back down to 50 total.

Can you imagine texts in 10 years? just all emojis with a few conjunctions sprinkled in.
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
klasma Avatar
17 months ago

Hieroglyphics, all over again. Future archeaologists are going to be WTF-ing about us.
Some of us already do.
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)