Every Emoji Kitchen Update Since 2020, Counted

Google has never published a changelog for Emoji Kitchen. There is no release page, no version number, and no announcement for most of the drops. What does exist, sitting inside the data files that power the feature, is a date stamped on every single pairing Google has ever shipped.

We parsed all 619 of those files. The result is a complete dated record of how Emoji Kitchen grew from one launch experiment in October 2020 into 146,793 unique pairings delivered across 43 separate releases. We have not found this published anywhere else, so the numbers below are ours rather than Google's.

What Emoji Kitchen actually is

If you have not used it, Emoji Kitchen is a Gboard feature that mashes two emoji into a single sticker. Pick a face, pick a second emoji, and Google hands you a drawing that combines them. A ghost and a heart become a ghost holding a heart. The results are images, not Unicode characters, so they send as pictures rather than text.

That distinction is why a catalogue exists at all. Every mashup has to be drawn by an illustrator and shipped as a file. Google cannot generate them on demand, which is exactly why the pairings arrive in dated batches and why those batches can be counted.

Where these numbers come from

Every base emoji that supports Emoji Kitchen has its own data file listing each partner it can be mixed with. Each of those entries carries the date that specific pairing went live. Group the entries by date and you get releases. Count the distinct unordered pairs and you get the catalogue size.

Two honest caveats. First, this reflects what Google serves today, so any pairing that was quietly removed will not appear. Second, the per release figures add up to 146,802 while the distinct pair count is 146,793, because nine pairings carry two different dates. We report both rather than smoothing the gap away.

Each mashup is served from a URL built out of the two code points and a date folder. The client needs to know which pairings exist before it offers them, so the list has to ship to the device rather than stay on a server. That is an implementation detail, and it is also the only reason anyone outside Google can audit the feature.

It means the record is Google's own rather than a reconstruction. We are not estimating release dates from news coverage or app updates. We are reading the date Google attached to each pairing when it shipped.

Launch day was 1 October 2020

Emoji Kitchen did not creep out quietly. The first release landed 10,639 pairings in a single day, which is still the fourth largest drop in its history. For context, that one day shipped more combinations than the whole of 2021 and 2022 put together.

The turtle is a good witness to that launch. It was there on day one with 143 partners, and it has been topped up 30 separate times since, reaching 359. Most of the animals you would expect were present from the start.

2021 was the quiet year

Four releases, 4,033 new pairings between them. The drops were 571 pairs in February, 167 in May, 828 in August and 2,467 in November. That November release was the only one all year that felt substantial.

If you used the feature back then and thought it had been abandoned, the data agrees with you. A feature that shipped 10,639 pairings on launch day added less than half that across the following fourteen months.

2022 stayed small and steady

Eight releases, 5,756 pairings. The year's biggest was 1,475 in early February, followed by 1,321 in August. There were also two releases that added exactly two pairings each, which looks far more like a bug fix than a feature drop.

2023 is when the catalogue doubled

Thirteen releases, 21,095 pairings, more than the previous three years combined. The standout was 13 November 2023 with 8,884 pairings in one go. April was busy too, with 4,231 landing on the eighteenth.

That April date is when the shark arrived, opening with 179 partners. It has since been extended 13 times and now sits at 601, which is well above the median. Sharks did better out of Emoji Kitchen than most animals that launched alongside them.

2024 contained the two drops that changed everything

Seven releases, 79,577 pairings. That single year accounts for more than half of everything Emoji Kitchen has ever shipped.

The biggest release in the feature's history was 30 May 2024, which added 33,128 pairings at once. That is more than three times the launch day total. It was followed on 21 October by 23,308, and earlier in the year on 6 February by 19,498. Any one of those three would be the largest drop of any other year.

Whatever changed internally at Google in 2024, it was not incremental. The feature went from a side project receiving occasional attention to something receiving serious engineering time.

2025 and 2026 have slowed down again

2025 delivered seven releases and 15,280 pairings, with the year front loaded: 10,006 of those arrived on 30 January. The rest of the year was thin, including one release in May that added two pairings.

2026 so far has three releases totalling 10,422, almost all of it in a 7,685 drop on 2 February. The most recent release we can see, dated 29 April 2026, added just 43 pairings. On the evidence, Emoji Kitchen is back in maintenance mode.

One more thing the dates reveal: Google ships in clusters. Releases on 26 and 27 January 2023 arrived a day apart, as did 30 April and 1 May 2025, and 21 and 23 October 2024. The second of each pair is always much smaller, which reads like a follow up fixing something the first one missed.

Every release date, in order

Here is the full list, oldest first, with the number of pairings each one added.

• 2020-10-01: 10,639
• 2021-02-18: 571
• 2021-05-21: 167
• 2021-08-31: 828
• 2021-11-15: 2,467
• 2022-01-10: 178
• 2022-02-03: 1,475
• 2022-04-06: 885
• 2022-05-06: 892
• 2022-08-15: 1,321
• 2022-08-23: 2
• 2022-11-01: 827
• 2022-11-07: 176
• 2023-01-26: 568
• 2023-01-27: 1,671
• 2023-02-16: 334
• 2023-02-21: 1
• 2023-03-01: 2,076
• 2023-04-18: 4,231
• 2023-04-21: 2
• 2023-04-26: 5
• 2023-08-03: 2,512
• 2023-08-18: 142
• 2023-08-21: 586
• 2023-11-13: 8,884
• 2023-11-28: 83
• 2024-02-06: 19,498
• 2024-02-14: 47
• 2024-05-30: 33,128
• 2024-06-10: 1,866
• 2024-07-15: 415
• 2024-10-21: 23,308
• 2024-10-23: 1,315
• 2025-01-30: 10,006
• 2025-02-04: 416
• 2025-04-30: 3,319
• 2025-05-01: 353
• 2025-05-19: 2
• 2025-07-31: 74
• 2025-10-29: 1,110
• 2026-01-28: 2,694
• 2026-02-02: 7,685
• 2026-04-29: 43

The pairings that will probably never exist

619 base emoji sounds low next to the roughly 1,700 emoji in the Unicode set, and the gap is deliberate. Flags are absent. So are skin tone variants, family sequences, and most of the multi person emoji built by joining several characters together.

The reason is drawing cost. Every supported base emoji multiplies the illustration work by the number of partners it gets, and sequences that already combine several characters do not reduce cleanly into a mashup. A rainbow works because it is one simple shape. A flag carries national meaning that Google has no appetite to remix.

So the practical ceiling is lower than the arithmetic suggests. 619 base emoji paired with each other would allow well over 190,000 combinations, and after five and a half years the catalogue sits at 146,793.

Not every emoji gets the same treatment

There are 619 base emoji in Emoji Kitchen, and the median one has 472 partners. That median hides a wide spread. 159 of them have complete coverage, meaning they can be mixed with every other base emoji in the set.

Complete coverage is rarer than it sounds. It means Google drew that emoji against all 618 others, which is several hundred illustrations for one character. The 159 that reached it are overwhelmingly faces and common animals, the ones people reach for first.

At the other end sits the cricket with 273 partners, the leanest in the whole catalogue. Popular faces and animals get topped up repeatedly while the long tail gets left where it started. The frog and the eyes are both among the heavily extended ones, which matches where the search demand actually is.

How this compares to the emoji set itself

Unicode has added roughly 1,700 emoji over three decades, at a pace of a few dozen a year and only after a formal proposal process. Emoji Kitchen shipped 33,128 new pairings in one day in May 2024.

The two systems are not really comparable, and that is the point. One is a standards body adding characters that every vendor then has to support forever. The other is one company shipping artwork it can withdraw whenever it likes. If you are relying on a specific mashup, keep a copy.

What the release pattern tells you

Emoji Kitchen is bursty, not continuous. Across five and a half years there are three drops of more than 19,000 pairings and sixteen drops of fewer than 500. Nine releases added under 100 pairings, and four added fewer than five.

Those tiny releases matter for reading the data. They are almost certainly corrections rather than content, which means counting releases alone overstates how often the feature genuinely grows. Weight by pairings and the picture is simpler: a strong launch, two quiet years, a ramp through 2023, an enormous 2024, then a tail off.

There is a second pattern worth noticing. The three largest drops all landed in 2024, and the three smallest meaningful ones have all landed since. Whatever team was expanding the catalogue appears to have moved on, and what remains looks like upkeep.

It also tells you something practical. If a pairing you want does not exist today, waiting is a poor strategy. The gaps between meaningful drops have been running at six months or more since early 2025.

How to browse what actually shipped

Our Emoji Kitchen pages carry the per emoji version of this data, so each hub shows that specific emoji's debut date, how many partners it launched with, and which pairings are newest. If you prefer mixing without the history, the emoji mixer does the same job in one screen.

For the wider picture of how the underlying emoji set grows, new emojis tracks what Unicode has approved, and Unicode versions breaks it down by release. Our emoji stats page covers the set as a whole, and emoji combos is the hand built alternative when a mashup is not what you need.

If you want the beginner version of the feature itself, start with our guide to using Emoji Kitchen and the mixer. For what is arriving in the base emoji set rather than the mashups, see the complete 2026 emoji list and the most used emoji of 2026. And because every one of these mashups is rendered by Google, our breakdown of vendor artwork differences explains why a Google drawing never reaches an Apple keyboard.