21 New Emojis

The Unicode Consortium approved the Emoji 15.0 collection last September, and Apple is introducing this latest set of glyphs in its own take with iOS 16.4. That’s basically on schedule — Emoji 14.0 arrived in iOS 15.4 last year — as it usually takes companies like Apple a few months to do up their own artwork to represent the new designs.

Technically speaking, while Apple mentions 21 new emojis in the release notes, there are actually 31 new ones in total. However, 10 of these are just skin-colour variations of the Rightward and Leftwards Pushing Hand emojis, so Apple’s number represents the number of unique emojis, from Donkey, Goose, and Jellyfish to Shaking Face and Maracas.

These new emojis are also one of the most compelling reasons to encourage your friends to update to iOS 16.4, since you’ll both need to be on the latest version of iOS 16.4 to exchange them via any chat platform; users on iOS 16.3 will see them as blank boxes.