iOS 17.4 Beta Adds New Emoji: Shaking Head, Lime, Phoenix, Brown Mushroom and More

Thursday January 25, 2024 10:42 am PST by Juli Clover

The iOS 17.4 beta that was released today introduces new emoji characters, which include lime, an edible brown mushroom, a phoenix, a broken chain, shaking head vertically (as in a "yes" nod), and shaking head horizontally (a "no" head shake).

Mockup of new emoji via Emojipedia

These characters are part of the Unicode 15.1 update that was approved in September 2023.

There are also four new family emoji combinations, along with updates to six people emoji that now have direction specifications such as facing right or facing left. The direction options can be used with person walking, person running, person kneeling, person with white cane, person in manual wheelchair, and person in motorized wheelchair.

This is a smaller update than we typically get, with fewer emoji characters, but that is because it is a .1 Unicode Consortium update rather than a major point update.

iOS 17.4 is limited to developers at the current time, but it should soon be coming to public beta testers. It will see an official launch sometime in March.

Related Forums: iOS 17, iPadOS 17

Top Rated Comments

nattK

29 months ago

Where will it end? Why can this childish crap not be optional? 1 million emojis, who needs this?

Invest your energy into features that actually have some benefit for your users, apple!

The Unicode Consortium, not Apple, decides when to introduce new emojis. Apple is just keeping up with the Unicode update to avoid those new emojis appearing as boxes when texting someone else on a platform that has been updated to support the new Unicode standard.

Score: 24 Votes (Like | Disagree)

ignatius345

29 months ago

Invest your energy into features that actually have some benefit for your users, apple!

I'm not 100% sure about this, but it could be that they have different people who design new Macs and iPhones, maintain iCloud services and so forth.

Or maybe you're right and it's just one huge pool of workers doing tasks totally at random.

Score: 15 Votes (Like | Disagree)

iGeneo

29 months ago

Where will it end? Why can this childish crap not be optional? 1 million emojis, who needs this?

Invest your energy into features that actually have some benefit for your users, apple!

This is the "get off my lawn" of iOS updates argument ;)

Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)

spercharged69

29 months ago

You can always tell who doesn't have any human interaction with anyone outside of their bubble by the people who don't understand why they keep adding emoji. To normal, non-tech oriented folks, "getting the new emoji" is a serious driver of installing an iOS update instead of constantly dismissing the prompt.

Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)