If you're a fan of emoji, get ready for a handful of killer new emoji to arrive on your iPhone in the coming weeks, including objectively the best new emoji: an orca whale. Apple released the fourth iOS 26.4 beta to developers on Monday, and it brings eight new emoji to the iPhones of developers.
The eight new emoji are:
- Orca
- Landslide
- Trombone
- Fight cloud
- Distorted face
- Ballet dancers
- Treasure chest
- Hairy creature (Sasquatch)
The Unicode Consortium is responsible for creating emoji, and it approved these new emoji in September as part of Unicode 17.0.
"These new emoji have long-standing symbolic meanings, are visually distinctive and contain multitudes of expression," the Unicode Consortium wrote in July 2025.
While developers can access these emoji now with iOS 26.4 dev beta 4, you can likely access these emoji in the coming weeks when Apple releases the update to the general public. Apple brought the face with bags under eyes () emoji and others to iPhones when it released iOS 18.4 on March 31, 2025.
While we don't know when Apple will release iOS 26.4 to the general public, I would expect the company to release the update around the end of March or the beginning of April.
Until then, you can learn more about what could be included in iOS 26.4, the recently proposed emoji you might see on your device in the future and how to decipher every emoji.
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