Apple Previews New Emoji Arriving in iOS 13, macOS Catalina, and More

Tomorrow is World Emoji Day, and Apple is starting the celebration early by offering a sneak peek at some of the new emoji arriving later this year in iOS 13, iPadOS 13, macOS Catalina, and watchOS 6.

In early February the Unicode Consortium, which makes all emoji approval decisions, debuted the full list of 230 emoji coming this year. Apple notes that this group can be consolidated to fifty-nine new emoji designs, many of which include variations – such as the people holding hands emoji, which can be customized in more than 75 ways to have various mixes of gender and skin tone. Another big theme in this emoji release is a set of disability-themed emoji, which Apple is actually responsible for proposing to the Unicode Consortium last year.

The previous two years, new emoji have launched in the x.1 updates to Apple’s software platforms, which often debut in October. If that tradition holds, we’re just a few short months away from gaining access to the 2019 emoji set.