One UI 8.5 Emojis
Samsung shipped Emoji 17.0 first, and drew one of them wrong
What emoji did One UI 8.5 add?
One UI 8.5 arrived on the Galaxy S26 series on 25 February 2026 and began rolling out more broadly from 25 March, starting with the Galaxy A37 5G and A57 5G. It brought 133 emoji from the Emoji 17.0 set to Samsung devices, which made Samsung one of the earliest platforms to ship them. Alongside the additions, Samsung revised several existing designs: White Flower lost its dotted markings, Pizza lost its onion and olive toppings, Bank gained a dollar sign, Cyclone was simplified to a spiral, Ship was reoriented to face left, and New Moon Face moved closer to Smirking Face.
Samsung beat Apple to Emoji 17.0 by a month
One UI 8.5 reached the Galaxy S26 series on 25 February 2026. Apple shipped the same set in iOS 26.4 in March, and Microsoft did not reach it until late August. The ordering changes every cycle and there is no reliable rule about who ships first, which is worth knowing if you are waiting on a specific emoji. What is consistent is the lag from ratification: Emoji 17.0 was approved in September 2025 and took roughly five months to reach the earliest shipping platform.
The apple core that became a pickle
Samsung drew an Apple Core for code point U+1FADD. Unicode subsequently reassigned that code point to Pickle in the Emoji 18.0 draft. Until Samsung redraws it, a message using that character shows an apple core on a Samsung device and a pickle on platforms that follow the current draft, which is an unusually clean example of why emoji sometimes mean different things at each end of a conversation. It also shows the risk vendors take by implementing draft code points before they are final.
Redesigns are easy to miss and change meaning
Six existing designs changed in this release. White Flower lost its dotted markings, Pizza lost its onion and olive toppings, Bank gained a dollar sign, Cyclone was simplified to a plain spiral, Ship was reoriented to face left, and New Moon Face moved closer in appearance to Smirking Face. That last one matters most in practice, because the two are already confused and a redesign that narrows the visual gap makes a misread more likely rather than less.
At a glance
| Shipped | |
|---|---|
| Platform | Samsung One UI |
| Emoji version implemented | Emoji 17.0 |
| Emoji added | 133 |
The emoji One UI 8.5 is remembered for
How to get these emoji
Emoji ship inside the system font, so there is no separate download and nothing to enable.
- Open Settings, then General, then Software Update.
- Install One UI 8.5 or any later version.
- Open any keyboard and tap the emoji button. The new characters are already in the picker.
If you send one of these to somebody on an older release, they see a blank box. The character transmits correctly either way, and appears as soon as they update.
The standard behind this release
Unicode 17.0 was published on 9 September 2025 and reached most phones during the first half of 2026. The headline count of 163 is misleading on its own: only seven are genuinely new drawings. The other 156 are skin-tone and variant sequences, most of them filling in the people wrestling and people with bunny ears emoji so both figures can carry different skin tones independently.
Read the full Unicode 17.0 recordFrequently Asked Questions
How do I get the One UI 8.5 emoji?
Open Settings, then Software update, then Download and install. One UI 8.5 reached the Galaxy S26 series on 25 February 2026 and started rolling out to other models from 25 March, so availability depends on which device you have and which region you are in.
Which emoji designs did Samsung change in One UI 8.5?
Several existing ones. White Flower lost its dotted markings, Pizza lost its onion and olive toppings, Bank gained a dollar sign, Cyclone became a simpler spiral, Ship now faces left, and New Moon Face was redrawn to look closer to Smirking Face.
Why does Samsung show an apple core where other phones show a pickle?
Samsung drew an Apple Core for code point U+1FADD, which Unicode later reassigned to Pickle in the Emoji 18.0 draft. Until Samsung redraws it, the same character shows as an apple core on those devices and as a pickle elsewhere, so the picture changes between sender and recipient.
Why does Samsung count 133 new emoji when Apple counts 163?
Because vendors count skin tone and gender sequences differently. The underlying Emoji 17.0 set is the same, but one platform may count a toned variant as a separate addition while another folds it into the base entry, so the headline numbers rarely match.
Browse iOS emoji releases
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Further reading
- Why some emoji look identicalCucumber against pickle, comet against meteor, and 18 more pairs.
- The seahorse emoji that never existedWhy millions remember one, and why AI chatbots insist it is real.
- The 25 oldest emoji, dated to 1993Checked against Unicode's own character age file. Half of them are zodiac.