Apple May Add Reversible Emoji in iOS 12 and macOS 10.14 Next Year

The Unicode Consortium has proposed new guidelines that would allow for reversible emoji. In other words, emojis such as a car or train that currently face to the left or right only would be able to face either direction.

reversible emoji

Reversible emoji mockup via Emojipedia

Apple and other vendors would be able to choose which emoji can be reversible on their devices, if any, according to their preferences.

The guidelines are still a draft that should be finalized by time the next major batch of over 100 new emoji characters are made available for companies like Apple to implement starting in the second half of 2018.

The Unicode Consortium has also introduced a handful of new emoji candidates for the second half of 2018, including a swan, badger, infinity, and pirate flag, according to Jeremy Burge at Emojipedia.org.

Unfortunately, for true emoji aficionados, it looks like "Frowning Pile Of Poo" and two other faces haven't made the cut for the next batch.

Emoji 11.0, proposed earlier this year, currently includes 130 new emoji candidates. Some notable inclusions are faces with red hair, faces with no hair, faces with curly or afro hairstyles, and hot and cold faces.

emoji 11 faces
Other candidates include new superheroes, a firecracker, a fire extinguisher, a test tube, a lacrosse stick with ball, a softball, and a bagel.

emoji 11 objects
The timeline means that iPhones and iPads could support both the new and reversible emoji in iOS 12 or iOS 12.1 around September to November of next year. The new batch should extend to the Mac as well in a future macOS update.

The emoji included in this article are sample images by Emojipedia.org and could vary slightly from Apple's final designs.

Related Forums: iOS 12, macOS Mojave

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Top Rated Comments

Blakey. Avatar
102 months ago
Cue rant about Emoji when the developers responsible for all the current bugs have nothing to do with the designing of them.
Score: 38 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ArtOfWarfare Avatar
102 months ago
Please let the middle finger be reversible. Right now I just send two in a row, but they're both the same sided hand so it doesn't look proper (although it could be argued that the gesture itself isn't proper, but that's in another sense of the word.)
Score: 36 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Recognition Avatar
102 months ago
Cue rant about Emoji when the developers responsible for all the current bugs have nothing to do with the designing of them.
Who needs prioritized Bluetooth, when you can get dozens of more unusable emoji's?
I mean, the idea of automatically setting a hierarchy of where Bluetooth goes to for phone calls (1- Phone; 2 - Airpods; 3 - Car Bluetooth) being different from where Bluetooth music is played. I doubt I'm the only one who wants a phone call routed to my Airpods while I'm driving, yet would listen to music in my Car audio system.
No, let's not do that .... more stupid emoji's. How bout some more cat emoji's? Maybe some killer clown emoji's? Certainly they are as useful as 99.5% of the crap emoji's that pollute the keyboard now.
...and there it is! Lol!
Score: 22 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Eagle_Eye Avatar
102 months ago
The first thing an Apple CEO is obligated to do: fire the entire emoji department and hire a new department for developing high end hardware and a better MacOS. Please, quit with the emojis already...
Score: 19 Votes (Like | Disagree)
enkadrummer88 Avatar
102 months ago
The first thing an Apple CEO is obligated to do: fire the entire emoji department and hire a new department for developing high end hardware and a better MacOS. Please, quit with the emojis already...
Apple isn't in charge of chosing new emojis. That's up to the Unicode Consortium (as stated in the first sentence of the article). Apple is only in charge of making sure their devices can display them properly once they are standard.
Score: 19 Votes (Like | Disagree)
JM Avatar
102 months ago
Maybe Apple will create a decent organizing and search method into messages. the orange letters are nice, and the tiny glyphs.... but it's still annoying to try and find that one specific emoji that you know exists, so you're left to swiping endlessly in the hopes you can find it.

How about a search bar like they have for #images?
Score: 15 Votes (Like | Disagree)