These are the new emojis coming to your iPhone in iOS 26

Macworld

Ballet dancers, bigfoot hunters, and trombone players, today is a special World Emoji Day for you! The Unicode Consortium has announced the newest set of emojis to be released, whittled down from the submissions late last year. Without further ado, here’s the list:

Apple Core

Ballet Dancers 

Distorted Face

Fight Cloud

Hairy Creature (it looks like Bigfoot)

Orca

Treasure Chest

Trombone

The only emoji that didn’t make the cut is landslide. The new emoji will be part of the Unicode 17.0 release, which is scheduled for this fall. They won’t be available when iOS 26 arrives in September, however. Since Apple adopts its own style for new emojis, this set will likely be available in a later iOS 26 update, likely in early 2026. For example, the latest set announced in 2024 was released as part of iOS 18.4 in March.

iOS 26 will also allow users to mix their favorite emoji with Apple Intelligence’s Genmoji feature.

The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit foundation that maintains the Unicode Standard, a set of standards used to make sure text and emoji maintain their integrity across platforms. Every year, Unicode releases a new set of emojis, based on submitted proposals. Anyone can submit an emoji proposal online, and Unicode also has an Adopt a Character program that helps fund the foundation.

Apple made its own emoji-related announcement on Thursday with the release of the new Emoji Game on its Apple News+ service. The object of Emoji Game is to complete word phrases by interpreting a given set of emoji. If you’re in the spirit of Word Emoji Day, play the game, then check out the World Emoji Awards and rock out to the World Emoji Day anthem. And then start counting the days until you can send everyone an emoji of bigfoot with a trombone.