New Emojis coming to iPhone with Apple’s iOS 26 update

A new batch of emojis has been approved for iOS 26.

Surprisingly enough, Apple or Google isn’t the ones that decide which emojis come to your phone.

That’s the job of Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that maintains the Unicode Standard, the universal character encoding system that ensures text and emoji appear consistently across platforms and devices.

Every year, the Unicode Consortium accepts suggestions for new emojis — and nine new ones have officially been selected for the next rollout.

The new emojis that will grace keyboards in iOS 26 include:

• Trombone
• Treasure Chest
• Distorted Face
• Hairy Creature 
• Fight Cloud
• Apple Core
• Orca
• Ballet Dancers 
• Landslide

“These new emojis have long-standing symbolic meanings, are visually distinctive, and contain multitudes of expression,” Unicode said in the announcement.

For example, the “hairy creature” is reportedly inspired by various “Big Foot”-esque creatures.

Apple will ultimately adopt their own versions of the emoji designs before adding the new set to iOS 26, but Unicode published their renderings for users to get an idea.

However, it’s unlikely iPhone users will see these new emojis in the first iteration of iOS 26.

As 9to5Mac noted, Apple usually waits until a later update in the software cycle to add new emojis. For example, this year’s new additions were part of iOS 18.4 — but it’s not always that late in the cycle.

New emojis could possibly be added in iOS 26.1 or 26.2 before the year ends.