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).
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.
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