Can my device show this emoji?

Why you see a box or a question mark

An emoji travels as a character code, not as a picture. Your device receives the code and then looks for a font that has a drawing for it. If the installed emoji font is older than the character, there is nothing to draw, so you get a fallback: an empty rectangle (often called tofu), a box with a question mark inside, or simply a gap. The message itself arrived intact. Update the font and the same message, untouched, displays correctly.

The emoji font comes with the operating system, not the app

On iPhone, Mac, Windows and most Android phones, the emoji font is part of the system and is replaced only by a system update. Updating Instagram or Snapchat does nothing for it, because those apps borrow whatever the system draws. That is why two people using the same app can see different things: the app matches, the operating system does not. It is also why this test reports on your device rather than on any single app.

Why WhatsApp, Telegram and X can show emoji your phone cannot

A few apps carry their own emoji artwork and draw it themselves. WhatsApp is the clearest case: version 2.26.8.72 for Android began rolling out on 6 March 2026 with 143 designs from Emoji 17.0, so an older Android phone that will never see another system update could still show them inside WhatsApp. Telegram and X also use their own images in most places. The catch is that the emoji only works inside that app. Copy it into a note or an email and it falls back to your system font, box and all.

Why flags turn into two letters on Windows

A country flag is not one character. It is a pair of regional indicator letters, so the flag of Japan is J followed by P, and the font is expected to merge the pair into a flag. The emoji font that ships with Windows has no country flags, so Chrome and Edge on Windows show the two letters instead. Firefox usually shows real flags there because it brings its own emoji font. The England, Scotland and Wales flags are built differently again, from a black flag followed by invisible tag characters, and fail on even more systems.

What to update to get Emoji 17.0

On iPhone and iPad, install iOS 26.4 or later: it shipped on 24 March 2026 and added 163 emoji. On Samsung Galaxy phones the set came with One UI 8.5, which reached the Galaxy S26 series on 25 February 2026 and rolled out more widely from 25 March. On Windows 11, Microsoft began delivering Emoji 17.0 on 27 August 2026 through a Release Preview update ahead of version 26H2, so a fully updated PC can have it before the feature update itself. Other Android phones depend on Google’s Noto emoji font and on whether the manufacturer ships it. Google’s August 2026 Noto 3D redesign redrew roughly 4,000 existing emoji but added no new characters, so a new look is not the same as new emoji.

Emoji 18.0 is approved, but no device has it

Unicode approved Emoji 18.0 on 16 September 2026: nine new concepts, among them a pickle, a lighthouse and a cracking face, plus ten skin-tone variants of two new thumb gestures. No platform has shipped artwork for any of them yet, so every device would fail them today and the test above does not try. In the releases we track, Apple has shipped each new set a median of 195 days after Unicode approval, and every year since 2022 that has meant a spring point release, which points to 2027 rather than this year.

What this test can and cannot tell you

The test draws each emoji onto an invisible canvas using the same fonts your browser uses for text, then checks two things: whether the result is coloured artwork, and whether it differs from a character that is known to be missing. It measures this browser on this device, which is not always the same as your keyboard. Firefox on Windows and Linux carries its own emoji font, so it can pass rows that Chrome on the same machine fails. Privacy tools that randomise canvas data can block the check entirely, and the page says so when that happens.

Where to go next

• The newest emoji, with pictures
• Emoji still in draft for future versions
• Every Unicode emoji version and its release date
• Every vendor emoji update we track
• Identify an emoji you cannot name

Emoji support questions