Every year, the Unicode Consortium selects new emoji to be added to the Unicode Standard. Unicode describes what the emoji should look like, but Apple and other vendors get to decide how each character will look on their devices. The same emoji can sometimes look very different on different devices. For example, the pistol emoji currently looks like a water gun on the iPhone but looks like a real gun on some other devices, and the pizza emoji always has pepperoni on it but the other toppings vary depending upon the device.
Emoji version 13.0 was announced by the Unicode Consortium on January 29, 2020, and it adds 117 new emojis. Last week for World Emoji Day, Apple provided the Emojipedia website with a preview of a few of the images that Apple will use when it implements Emoji version 13.0 later this year. As always, the designers at Apple have done a really nice job with these.
Visit this page of Eomjipedia if you want to learn more about Apple’s new designs. Here is a preview of some of the new emoji that we will see on the iPhone and other Apple devices later this year: Dodo, Nesting Dolls, Piñata, Tamale, Pinched Fingers, Boomerang, Ninja, Coin, Anatomical Heart, Beaver, Transgender Symbol, Bubble Tea, and Lungs.
Images from Apple / Emojipedia composite
Apple typically releases the new emoji in a release that comes after the main operating system release. So I don’t expect to see these new emoji in iOS 14.0, but perhaps they will be in iOS 14.1. In prior years, Apple released new emoji at the very end of October — iOS 11.1 (October 31, 2017), iOS 12.1 (October 30, 2018), and iOS 13.2 (October 28, 2019) — so that makes me think that we are about three months away from being able to use these new emoji.