2022 is almost (emoji) wrapped 🎁🥳  23rd December 2022

2022 is almost (emoji) wrapped 🎁🥳

As 2023 begins to come to a close, and various holiday emojis experience their annual global uptick, it’s the latest edition of the Emoji Wrap newsletter 🌯📯

It's been just over three months since Emoji 15.0 was officially approved, so as we say farewell to 2022, let's review which major emoji keyboards have gotten the Goose, and which ones are still waiting a little longer for that plain Pink Heart.

🤖 Google released their new designs for both Noto Color Emoji and Noto Emoji via downloadable font files. While not yet rolled out to Android devices' emoji keyboards, these emojis are now supported within Gmail.

⚫ Samsung released its Emoji 15.0 support alongside its long-awaited Emoji 14.0 designs, adding a total of 138 new emojis to the platform's native emoji font all at once.

🟢 WhatsApp, meanwhile, currently have their Emoji 15.0 designs in beta, so we expect to see these ones very soon.

🍎 Apple's first beta for iOS 16.3, which was launched last week, contained no new emoji designs. Based on this year's iOS 15.4 release, we'd expect to see these designs appear in a beta release over the next several weeks, most likely in the new year.

🐦 While there have been reports that Twitter have prepared their Twemoji 15.0 update, these designs have yet to be released. Since the release of Emoji 15.0 a new highly-detailed emoji sticker set was made available within select Twitter features, albeit only with support up to 2020's Emoji 13.1.

📘 Facebook has yet to support Emoji 15.0, though they have tended to debut their support in the middle of the year.

🪟 Finally, while Microsoft did release a Windows 11 emoji update since the approval of Emoji 15.0, this update only introduced emojis from Emoji 14.0 such as 🫠 Melting Face, 🥹 Face Holding Back Tears, and 🫡 Saluting Face.

Speaking of the 🫡 Saluting Face, it's been recently lauded as one of the emojis of the year following its viral usage across Twitter.

Also in this edition of the Emoji Wrap, we share some renewed discussions of how people use skin tone emojis and a link to a research study on how emojis can be made more accessible.

Additionally, we share a recent history of how the 🍆 became what it is today, and a Unicode announcement which means next year's emoji release will contain only ZWJ sequences like Emoji 12.1 and Emoji 13.1 if any new released at all.