Among the new emojis added by Apple in the iOS 26.4 beta, the "Distorted Face" is garnering unexpected attention. This is because the character reminds people of Apple's past controversies, rather than the new emoji itself. Reactions suggest that this face resembles the yellow character from Apple's "Crush" commercial, which faced significant criticism in 2024. At the time, the commercial was criticized for undermining creativity through a scene in which musical instruments and art tools were crushed by a giant press, and Apple apologized, stating, "We misrepresented our intentions.".
A total of 163 emojis have been added in this beta. Among them, 13 are completely new concept emojis, and the remaining 150 are combinations of skin tones applied to the existing human wrestling emoji and the human with rabbit ears emoji. Newly added emojis include a distorted face, a fight, a cloud, a ballet dancer, an orca, a furry creature, a trombone, a landslide, and a treasure chest.
These emojis are included in the Emoji 17.0 recommendation released by Unicode in September 2025. However, Apple has finally applied the actual graphic designs in this Beta 4. In the first version of iOS 26.4 Beta 3, released on March 2, the item was already supported within the emoji keyboard, but users could only confirm its existence through the search function, and the official designs were not visible.
Subsequently, Apple released a revised version of Beta 3 but did not include the new emoji designs. Ultimately, it was only with this Beta 4 that the new emoji visuals were revealed for the first time. This demonstrates that Apple is separating feature support from the implementation of designs and proceeding with them sequentially.
