Who decides which new emojis get made?

Nobody at Apple or Google wakes up and decides the world needs a pickle emoji. New emojis start as public written proposals to a nonprofit called the Unicode Consortium, get argued over against an actual scorecard, and only then get handed to vendors to draw. It's a slower, more bureaucratic process than most people assume — and a more open one, too.

It starts with a public proposal — from anyone

Unicode runs an open submission window most years (this year it's April through the end of July). Anyone can submit, but "anyone" doesn't mean "anything gets in": the required document has to argue the case with real evidence — Google Trends charts, Ngram data, screenshots of actual usage — not a petition or a wave of social-media hashtags, both of which Unicode's own guidelines say explicitly will not be considered. Proposals also get auto-declined for a fixed list of categories no matter how well-argued: brand logos, specific real people, specific buildings, and religious deities, among others.

What actually gets an emoji approved

Every surviving proposal gets weighed against the same handful of factors, and none of them alone is enough. Distinctiveness — does it read as one clear, recognizable thing at the size of an actual emoji on a phone keyboard, not a fine-grained variant of something that already exists. Usage level — real evidence the concept gets searched for and talked about at real volume, not "this would be nice." Completeness — does it fill an actual gap in an existing, closed set, the way scorpion completed the zodiac emojis. Compatibility — was it already popular as a symbol on a platform like Snapchat before anyone proposed encoding it. A working group called the Emoji Standard & Research Working Group reviews every submission against that list before anything reaches a vote.

Then the Unicode Technical Committee votes

The names and codepoints that survive review go to the Unicode Technical Committee — the UTC — for final sign-off at one of its quarterly meetings. That vote is what actually locks a year's list: a name and a codepoint become permanent, but notably, no required artwork comes with it. The Emoji 18.0 list got its final UTC sign-off this way, with the release date locked well ahead of any phone actually shipping the designs.

Vendors draw their own artwork, on their own schedule

Only after a codepoint is locked do Apple, Google, Samsung and everyone else start designing. Each vendor commissions its own artists, which is why the same approved concept — say, "pickle" — ends up looking completely different on an iPhone than on a Pixel, and why some platforms ship a batch months ahead of others. Check the new emojis page for exactly where each platform currently stands on the latest list.

Roughly two years, proposal to keyboard

Going by the last several cycles: a proposal submitted this summer gets a decision by year's end, a locked codepoint the following summer, and — if vendors move at their usual pace — real keyboard availability roughly a year after that. Two years, start to finish, is the honest rough estimate; some emojis move faster, plenty take longer.

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