Emoji are a great way to add some fun to your messages, and according to Emojipedia, there are 3,790 emoji. But there’s no emoji for a dog wearing pajamas, a plate with burgers and fries and many other things. If you have Genmoji on your iPhone, though, you can create these emoji and many more.
Apple released iOS 18.2 in December, the company introduced its own emoji generator, called Genmoji, to Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones. The Unicode Standard, a universal character encoding standard, is responsible for creating new emoji, and approved emoji are added to all devices once a year. With Genmoji, you don’t have to wait for new emoji to appear on your iPhone each year. You can just create them as you need them.
Read on to learn how to use Genmoji on iPhone to create your own custom emoji. Just note that only iPhones with Apple Intelligence, like the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max or a device from the iPhone 16 lineup, can use Genmoji at this time.
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How to make custom emoji
1. Open Messages and go into a chat.
2. Tap the plus (+) button next to your text box.
3. Tap Genmoji.
Then, type a description of an emoji into the text box near the bottom of your screen and tap the check mark on your keyboard to enter that description into Genmoji. You can also tap different suggestions and themes that are right above the text box.
Your iPhone will generate a series of new emoji for you to pick from according to your description, and you can swipe through these new emoji. When you find the one you want, tap Add in the top right corner of your screen and the new emoji will be available to use as an emoji, tapback or a sticker. Now you don’t have to wait for the Unicode Standard to propose, create and bring new emoji to devices.
In the iOS 26 beta, you can also combine and use emoji to create others, rather than describing a new emoji or using suggestions. That means you can combine the grinning face with sweat (😅) and the football (🏈) to create an emoji that describes most Cincinnati Bengals fans during football season.
Look, it’s me watching every Bengals game this season!
Using emoji in Genmoji is part of the iOS 26 beta so only developers and beta testers can use it for now. It’s possible that Apple could adjust Genmoji before the final version of iOS 26 is released this fall — the week after Tuesday’s Apple event, based on my prediction.
For more iOS news, here are my first impressions of the beta version of iOS 26, how to enable call screening in the beta and all the new features Apple said it will bring to your device later this year. You can get an early view of the upcoming iPhone features with our iOS 26 cheat sheet.
