Emoji news
What changed in the standard, in the fonts of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung, and in how emoji are actually used.
- Male and female emoji come out exactly even โ 605 each We sorted all 3,953 catalogue entries by gender. Female: 605. Male: 605. And it is not just the total that matches โ every intermediate count lines up too. Where gender is not written with a sign, though, nothing guarantees the balance.
- Emoji turn out to be the minority in combos โ 46% of the characters We counted every one of the 2,192 combos in the section. Emoji account for 5,151 characters out of 11,231; the rest are stars, dots and dashes. And while there are 1,076 distinct emoji, there are only 56 distinct decorative marks.
- Google redrew every emoji in 3D โ and added not a single new one Noto 3D shipped with the Pixel 11 on 20 August: flat artwork replaced by volume across the whole set. The update brings no new symbols at all โ and those are two different events that get confused constantly.
- Sixty-five collections hold 744 symbols โ less than half the catalogue We counted how many emoji make it into at least one themed collection. The answer is 744 standalone symbols out of 1,744. Two categories account for the gap: flags contribute exactly two symbols out of 270, while smileys contribute 125 out of 171.
- Thirty fixed emoji pairs โ and not one symbol newer than 2021 The pair ๐๐ญ does not mean death and grief; it means laughing to the point of collapse. We went through all thirty such pairs in the section and checked how old their symbols are: 35 of the 47 participants date from 2010 and 2015, and the last four releases of the standard contribute none.
- 240 kaomoji that never need a font update New emoji take years to reach devices, and until they do some readers see an empty box. Kaomoji do not have that illness: they are built from ordinary characters. We took our set apart โ 240 faces, 247 distinct characters, twenty groups.
- Eight and eight: the emoji set has almost stopped growing The last two releases of the standard brought eight new concepts each. Ten years ago a single release brought two hundred and fifty. We counted the increments across our catalogue โ and explain why the new-symbol counter says something different.
- Eleven months on, Windows is the only platform without Emoji 17.0 Google shipped the new symbols in September 2025, Samsung and Apple followed in spring. The latest Microsoft set is from August 2025 and has no Emoji 17.0 in it. For readers that means 163 catalogue entries showing up as empty boxes on Windows.
- 2,030 of 3,953 catalogue entries are skin tones We counted the catalogue by a single property. Only 1,923 entries carry no tone at all; the rest is the same gesture in five colours. One handshake takes up 26 entries.
- 270 flag emoji for 193 countries: who owns the rest The catalogue holds more flags than the UN has members. We took the section apart: 59 territories, two organisations and eight drawings that are not country flags at all.
- Emoji 17.0: 163 catalogue entries, eight of them new ideas We took the latest version of the standard apart. 150 of its 163 entries are skin tones bolted onto two characters that are sixteen and ten years old.
- Samsung beat Apple to Emoji 17.0 by almost a month One UI 8.5 delivered the new characters on 25 February; iOS 26.4 followed on 24 March. Microsoft has not shipped the version at all.
- Emoji 18.0: nineteen candidates, due in September The draft of the next version holds nine new concepts and ten skin tone variations. Some candidates are usually dropped before approval.
