If you think there are far too many emoji already, get ready for some bad news: There are always more emoji on their way. The conveyor belt of emojis never stops, and new emojis will keep arriving on your iPhone until the heat death of the emojiverse.
We’ve now got a good idea of the emoji that the conveyor belt is likely to disgorge next year, thanks to the Unicode Consortium publishing the proposals currently expected to feature in version 16.0 of its emoji list. (At time of writing the latest set of emoji is version 15.1.) Version 16.0 is currently slated to include new emoji for:
- Face with bags under eyes
- Fingerprint
- Leafless tree
- Root vegetable (basically a beet, although turnip is included in the searchable keywords)
- Harp
- Shovel
- Splatter
- Flag for the island of Sark
These emoji may be subject to change or removal between now and the 16.0 release some time next year, but the fact that the consortium has published the list indicates that they are likely to make the cut. Beyond that, however, the Unicode Consortium steps back and allows technology companies to handle the emoji in their own way; Apple, Google and others will produce their own artwork for each of the above and these may differ starkly from one another. (Most famously, Apple arbitrarily changed the emoji for a gun into a water pistol back in 2016, a decision later followed by other companies.)
One way or another, however, you are likely to see the beet, the shovel and the splatter arrive on your iPhone some time in 2025 as part of an iOS 18 point update. And it won’t cost you a penny.
Author: David Price, Editor, Macworld
David has been writing about technology for well over two decades, and got on board the Apple hype train when covering the original iPhone launch in 2007. He is an enthusiastic Apple Watch evangelist and feels that the HomePod is misunderstood.