Apple Added 398 New Emoji in iOS 13.2. Here’s What’s New.
source: Apple designs / Emojipedia
iOS 13.2 comes with a whole host of new emoji (398 to be exact). As is the case with Apple’s currently-existing emoji library, the newly introduced emoji span a wide range of topics. There are a few prominent themes, however. There are several new icons related to accessibility, there are gender-neutral options to accompany all existing male/female emoji, new food and beverage icons, animals, and then a whole host of miscellaneous ones.
Here are some of the best new emoji from each category.
1. Accessibility
Apple first began proposing accessibility-related emoji a little over a year ago. Many of these proposals can be seen in this latest release.
Among the new emoji is a blind person, prosthetic limbs, a guide dog, a person in a wheel chair, and a hearing aid. This is part of a broader trend of the group of unicode emoji slowly expanding to represent a broader group of people (other examples include LGBT couples and a broader range of available skin tones for faces and hands.)
Source: Emojipedia
2. Gender Neutral Emoji
Gender neutral characters are probably the biggest change in terms of total emoji added. This update adds 457 gender neutral options. Note that this number is larger than the 398 new-emojis number, since these are technically options being added to existing emoji rather than completely new characters.
These new emojis’ defining features are different clothing color (grey in most cases, in contrast to blue and pink colors for the male and female versions) and a hair style whose length is between that of the existing male and female versions.
Source: Emojipedia
3. Food and Beverage
Adding food and beverage options is pretty much expected in an emoji release at this point. This update includes waffles, butter, an onion, an ice cube, and others.
Source: Emojipedia
Lil Nas X was particularly excited about the ice cube.
omg this is gonna be perfect for when we talk about ice cubes https://t.co/3nOGOPtEHU
— nope (@LilNasX) October 29, 2019
4. Animals
New animals are also a staple of emoji releases. This update brings with it a sloth, skunk, flamingo, guide dogs, and a skunk.
Source: Emojipedia
5. Misc.
Finally, there’s a bunch of random new additions that don’t really fit a theme. These include a drop of blood, a razor, a sari, and Saturn.
Perhaps getting the most attention, though, is the pinching fingers emoji, which might put an end to unsolicited dick pics once and for all.
Source: Emojipedia
For much more information, emojipedia has everything you could ever want to know and more.