Steve Hayman 🇨🇦🇬🇱🪊Mar 9

ALERT ALERT ALERT iOS 26.4 beta 4 brings us what we have ALL been waiting for: A Trombone Emoji!

Approved in Unicode 17.0, the glyph U+1FA8A finally appears with this beta.

Here's one as an actual Unicode glyph: 🪊

Now, that may or may not look like an actual trombone to you, depending on what version of what you are running.. It looks like this - this is an image, not an actual emoji though; it's how iOS renders it. Different vendors have the option of drawing it how they like.

Show threadSteve Hayman 🇨🇦🇬🇱🪊Mar 9
We can now start enthusiastically nitpicking its actual appearance. I think Apple's artist did a pretty good job - at least it isn't assembled backwards like we often see. Although it is missing a spit valve, and another brace between mouthpiece and horn so the slide will actually slide, and a trombone wouldn't really have a 2nd connector circled here.
Show threadSteve Hayman 🇨🇦🇬🇱🪊Mar 9

The Trombone emoji is a pretty good story. You have to make a detailed pitch to the Emoji subcommittee of the Unicode consortium about why a particular emoji should be added, and then they vote on it. Many are rejected. But a group of high schoolers from Aberdeen High School in Maryland submitted a successful pitch in 2019 and it's finally here.

Their pitch: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2024/24256-trombone-emoji.pdf

Thank you, kids.

Show threadPepijn Bruienne
@shayman And as is tradition, there's a 99 Percent Invisible about it, of course: https://overcast.fm/+AAyIOxtMII0
Person in Lotus Position — 99% Invisible

Tech analysts estimate that over six billion emojis are sent each day. Emojis, which started off as a collection of low-resolution pixelated images from Japan, have become a well-established and graphically sophisticated part of everyday global communi…

Mar 9 at 6:41pmWeb