Overview
- Apple has rolled out iOS 26.4 for iPhone, adding eight new emoji and 163 additional variants.
- The new icons are a distorted face, a comic‑style cloud of punches, a gender‑neutral ballet dancer, an orca, a hairy creature, a trombone, a landslide, and a treasure chest.
- These characters come from Unicode 17.0, a cross‑platform standard that only appears correctly once each device’s software supports it.
- People on older iOS or other non‑updated systems will see empty boxes or placeholder symbols when these emoji are sent to them.
- Apple’s artwork includes a gender‑neutral ballet dancer whose shoe color changes with skin tone and a Puerto Rico flag with a lighter blue to reflect historical references.