Over the years, people have gotten so excited about new emojis arriving on the iPhone. However, 2025 seems to be breaking the trend for two reasons: One is for the smaller number of new emojis, while the other is Genmoji support.
First previewed in May 2024, the Unicode Consortium revealed Unicode 16, which included the all-new emojis coming with iOS 18 and Android 15. After the beta review period, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other vendors accepted the suggestions and started working on their own versions.
With iOS 18.4 beta 2, Apple revealed the seven new emojis landing on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Vision Pro, and Apple Watch users in early April. They include a face with bags under the eyes, a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a root vegetable, a harp, a shovel, and splatter.
While the face with bags under the eyes is by far the most interesting iOS 18 emoji addition, this feels like the most boring emoji update ever. Of course, not only has the Unicode Consortium already added hundreds of options to users, but there aren’t that many impressive figures left. Besides, iPhone 15 Pro owners (or newer) have a new feature that can make all their weird dreams come true: Genmoji.
With this Apple Intelligence feature, iPhone users can use AI to generate new emoji characters based on text input, such as “T-rex wearing a tutu on a surfboard.”
What makes Genmoji in iOS 18 unique is that Apple designed an API to make them work like stickers and Memoji and behave like emojis. According to a developer’s session, Genmoji can be used alongside regular text, and these figures can be used alone, copied, pasted, and sent as stickers. They will even respect line height and text formatting.
That said, even though iOS 18 doesn’t add a khinkali emoji, I can still create the perfect Genmoji with it. Or if I just want to send a monkey in a pink hat, I can do that, too. To be fair, I don’t think the Unicode Consortium is giving up on new emojis. However, iPhone users have endless possibilities now, and it’s only a matter of time until third-party apps start adding proper support for these figures to work more like emojis and less like stickers.
