When Do New Emojis Come Out? Every 2026 Release Date, Platform by Platform 📅
"When do the new emojis come out?" has two different answers, and mixing them up is why the question feels so confusing. There's the date Unicode approves a set, and there's the date the emoji actually appear on your phone. Those are usually about six months apart.
Below is every confirmed date for the current batch, sourced from the vendor changelogs themselves — no estimates.
Why there's a gap between approval and your keyboard
The Unicode Consortium doesn't make emoji images. It assigns code points and publishes recommendations. After that, every vendor — Apple, Google, Samsung, Meta, Microsoft — has to draw its own artwork for each character and ship it inside a normal software update.
So the sequence runs: Unicode recommends → vendors design → vendors ship an OS or app update → you get the emoji. Emoji 17.0 was recommended for release on 9 September 2025, alongside Unicode 17.0.[3] The first mainstream phones didn't have it until late February 2026.
The Emoji 17.0 rollout timeline
Apple: iPhone, iPad and Mac — 24 March 2026
Apple shipped Emoji 17.0 in the public release of iOS 26.4 on 24 March 2026, introducing designs for 163 new emojis drawn from Unicode's Emoji 17.0 recommendations, along with 150 new skin tone combinations for existing emoji. Eight entirely new emoji concepts debuted in the update.[1]
The same set rolled out simultaneously across iPadOS 26.4, tvOS 26.4, watchOS 26.4 and macOS 26.4, so an iPhone, iPad and Mac updated on the same day all gained the emoji together.[1] This was Apple's first Unicode emoji update since the company shifted its versioning system to align with the calendar year.[1]
Samsung: One UI 8.5 — 25 February 2026
Samsung was first among the big platforms. One UI 8.5 was released on the Galaxy S26 series on 25 February 2026, adding 133 new emojis from Emoji 17.0 to the Samsung set and revising the designs of several already-available emoji.[2]
If you don't own an S26, your date is later. The broader rollout began on 25 March 2026, starting with the Galaxy A37 5G and Galaxy A57 5G, with the Galaxy S25 series, Galaxy S24 series and select Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip models expected to follow — subject to regional variation and carrier approval, as is standard for Samsung firmware.[2]
One UI 8.5 also added multi-person skin tone sequences for the existing People Wrestling and People With Bunny Ears emoji, which Unicode formally recommended as part of Emoji 17.0.[2]
WhatsApp: 6 March 2026 (Android only)
WhatsApp began rolling out version 2.26.8.72 for Android on 6 March 2026, introducing support for the Emoji 17.0 recommendations with 143 new emoji designs and revised artwork for a small number of existing ones.[3]
Google and Android: designs in 2025, rollout through 2026
Google moved earliest and slowest at the same time. It unveiled its Emoji 17.0 designs within the Noto Color Emoji and Noto Emoji sets on the same day Unicode 17.0 and Emoji 17.0 were formally approved, and also revised several hundred previously released emoji designs to converge more closely with other vendors' artwork.[4]
Getting those designs onto actual products is the slower half. Emojipedia reported the new emoji were "expected to be released progressively across different Google platforms such as Chrome OS, Gmail, YouTube, and various Android devices throughout 2026" — without a fixed date for each surface.[4] If you're on Android and don't have them yet, that staggered rollout is why.
Why the emoji counts don't match
You'll notice three different numbers above: 163 for Apple, 143 for WhatsApp, 133 for Samsung. That isn't an error. Each vendor's changelog reports the count of new designs in that vendor's own set, and vendors differ in which sequences they had already supported before Emoji 17.0 arrived.
Samsung, for example, already supported single skin tone variants of People Wrestling and People With Bunny Ears as far back as 2016 and 2017 — so the sequences Unicode newly recommended in Emoji 17.0 counted differently for Samsung than for a vendor starting from scratch.[2] The headline Unicode figure for Emoji 17.0 is 163 new emoji.[1]
When will the next emojis — Emoji 18.0 — be released?
Nineteen new emoji are currently under consideration for Emoji 18.0, which is slated for Unicode approval in September 2026. If approved, the batch would push the total count of Unicode-recommended emoji to 3,972.[6]
Approval is not availability, though — and this time we have the timing from Unicode itself. Writing on the Unicode blog on 14 July 2026, Jennifer Daniel introduced the batch as "the new emoji heading to your keyboard next Spring," and signed off with "we have next Spring to look forward to."[5] On the same roughly six-month cadence Emoji 17.0 followed, that points to spring 2027 for the first devices.
Want the actual list of what's coming rather than the dates? We keep the full breakdown in our guide to the new emojis of 2025 and 2026, including the published Emoji 18.0 beta chart.
💬 EmojiCircle's Take
The single most useful thing to understand here is that "new emoji released" headlines in September are
about a standard, not a product. Nothing appears on your phone that day. The dates that actually
matter to you are the vendor ones — and in 2026 those were 25 February, 6 March and 24 March, depending on
what you carry in your pocket.
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Sources
- Emojipedia — Apple iOS 26.4 Emoji Changelog, 24 March 2026.
- Emojipedia — Samsung One UI 8.5 Emoji Changelog, 25 March 2026.
- Emojipedia — WhatsApp 2.26.8.72 Emoji Changelog, 6 March 2026.
- Emojipedia — Google Debuts Emoji 17.0 Support, 10 September 2025.
- Unicode — Jennifer Daniel, Why do some new emoji look familiar?, 14 July 2026.
- Emojipedia — What's New On World Emoji Day 2026, 17 July 2026.
Explore More Emojis
See what's actually in the latest batch in our new emojis 2025 & 2026 guide, or learn how Unicode decides what becomes an emoji in the first place. You can also read what the first emoji actually was, browse the current standard with our emoji search engine, or dig into Smileys and Objects.