First Look: New Emojis in iOS 17.4

Keith Broni

Jan 25, 2024 • 2 min read

New emojis have arrived on iOS as part of the first iOS 17.4 beta. The new additions include a phoenix, a lime, smileys shaking their heads up and down, and a series of direction-specifying people emojis.

Editor's Note: iOS 17.4 is out now. Read more about the official release.

The new emojis in today's beta release are drawn from Unicode's September 2023 recommendations: Emoji 15.1.

These 118 additions consist of six brand new emoji concepts, four new non-gender-specifying family emojis, and new direction-specifying versions of six existing people emojis that amount to 108 new emojis when gender and skin tone variations are accounted for.

The six completely new emoji concepts currently in beta for iOS 17.4 are:

Meanwhile, the four new family emojis are:

In addition to these new four non-gender-specifying family emojis being introduced, the iOS 17.4 beta also changes all of the existing family emoji designs.

Instead of displaying colorful people emojis alongside one another, all of the family emojis now display different combinations of white silhouettes overlayed on a grey square icon.

Closing out the new additions in iOS 17.4 are the introduction of six people emoji characters that now have direction-specifying variations:

Each of these supports all three emoji gender options as well as the five skin tone modifier options, bringing their total to 108.

Within the emoji keyboard of today's iOS 17.4 beta, the alternative-direction emoji characters appear to be accessible alongside their left-facing counterparts.

However, a bug occurs when they are attempted to be selected: the selected emoji is inverted back to its left-facing counterpart, as are all its skin tone options.

This is illustrated below via the 🏃‍♀️‍➡️ Woman Running Facing Right being selected, but the 🏃‍♀️ Woman Running and their skin tone options appearing instead.

This is of course expected to be corrected in a future iOS 17.4 beta update prior to iOS 17.4's official release.

📶 Release

Coming to iOS later "this Spring" (northern hemisphere), these updates are in iOS 17.4 beta 1 which is now available for developers.

Based on past iOS beta history it's likely that the final public release of iOS 17.4 will come to users in March or April 2024.

As with all beta software, designs are subject to change prior to the final release, as has been seen within the beta releases for iOS 15.4 and iOS 12.1.