The supposed pop star ’emojis’ that aren’t going to be added to iOS 18.5 – Image Credit: DropPop/X
A social media post has gone viral with the claim that Apple will be releasing emojis of major pop stars as part of iOS 18.5. The only problem is, the prediction is complete crap.
A post to X has gained significant traction online, claiming Apple will be adding new emoji to iOS 18.5. Despite the wild attention the post has received, it is completely false.
Posted on April 2, X account “Drop Pop” offers a message sounding like a headline, claiming that Apple has teased a set of new emoji. The set of eight, consisting of well known female pop stars, is alleged in the post to be included in the iOS 18.5 update.
The post itself offers little else other than the headline, as well as the Apple logo, and eight emoji-style images that each represent a major musical artist. The list includes what appears to be Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and others.
Despite the lack of information and no supporting evidence other than an image, the post has gone viral. At the time if publication, it has been viewed 41.6 million times, with 110,000 likes and 3.6 thousand comments.
A lie detached from bureaucracy
Despite the wild reception to the post online, it is a complete fabrication in quite a few ways.
The first problem is the source, as @DropPopNet is a parody account that shares spoof news in the style of other celebrity and fandom accounts. The handle does identify itself as a parody account if users check out its X bio, but this may not have been enough for millions to read and believe the content is real anyway.
The claim that Apple teased the images is also untrue, as emojis typically surface in the developer betas before being introduced to the general public, as with the batch introduced in iOS 18.4.
There’s also the Unicode Consortium to consider, as it is the controller of the standards associated with emoji. It decides, through a laborious and extremely long process, what emoji will be included in the next release.
Once decided, it’s up to platform holders like Apple to add customized versions of the iconography to the operating systems and apps, which can take months. The entire process between being introduced by the Unicode Consortium as a candidate to actually being included in Messages can take about a year.
There’s also the fact that the Unicode Consortium has rules about what can be included as an emoji.
Under its guidelines for submissions of new emoji ideas, the list of automatically declined items include “Specific people, whether fictional, historic, living, or dead.” There’s also issues over third-party IP rights and image licensing, which the Unicode Consortium also avoids with its selections.
Emoji-adjacent
While it is probable that the images are created by an artist, there could be a way for someone to create their own similar emoji using Genmoji.
Genmoji, part of Apple Intelligence, allows users to make suggestions for what kind of emoji image they want to exist. They are then generated, and can be immediately added to a message.
However, you cannot simply enter a pop star’s name as the type of emoji to create, as it won’t work. While you can take advantage of your Photos library and use images of people as the base for a Genmoji image, they have to be defined as a person you know within the Photos app to be count.
While there is this limitation in place, it wouldn’t be difficult for someone to add a lot of images of a star to their Photos library. They could feasibly wait for the star to be detected as a possible person the user knows in Photos, and then selecting the star as the contact to make the Genmoji from.
Given the amount of effort required for the images to be collected, detected as a person by the iPhone, and then cajoling Genmoji to make the appropriate image, this seems like an improbable option for most people to go through.
