Samsung One UI 8.5 Emoji

Samsung One UI 8.5 emoji support is the Galaxy line's implementation of Emoji 17.0 — the batch Unicode approved in September 2025. On a Galaxy phone running One UI 8.5 you get a set of characters that older Samsung software simply cannot draw.

Samsung One UI 8.5 emoji questions almost always come down to that gap between the standard and the phone. That is where most confusion starts. Unicode approving a character, Samsung drawing it, One UI shipping it, and your particular handset receiving that update are four separate events, sometimes months apart. This guide keeps them separate, because "my friend has it and I don't" almost always comes down to which of those four stages your phone has reached.

What New Emojis Came With Samsung One UI 8.5?

Eight new designs arrived. These are the ones that are genuinely new artwork rather than variations of something you already had.

The Ballet Dancer is worth separating from the rest, because it is built differently. It is not a single character but a sequence — a person joined to a ballet shoe — which is why it carries skin tone options where the others do not. Counting it as one emoji or as six depends entirely on whether you count sequences, and that distinction explains the numbers in the next section.

Samsung One UI 8.5 and Emoji 17.0 Explained

Understanding Samsung One UI 8.5 emoji support means separating four layers that get mixed up constantly. Four different organisations and layers are involved, and mixing them up produces most of the wrong information about this update.

• Unicode defines the standard. It decides that a character exists, assigns it a codepoint and a name, and publishes a reference image. It does not draw the emoji you actually see.
• Emoji 17.0 is the specific batch approved in September 2025. Unicode's Emoji 17.0 chart puts the total at 163 emoji and sequences — a figure that counts skin tone and gender combinations alongside new designs.
• Samsung draws its own artwork for every character it supports. The Galaxy set is Samsung's illustration of the standard, not Unicode's.
• One UI 8.5 is the software release that delivers those drawings to your phone. It is based on Android 16 QPR2, which is a later base than One UI 8.0's Android 16.

There is one number discrepancy worth flagging rather than smoothing over. Emojipedia counts 133 new emoji in Samsung's One UI 8.5 set, while Unicode counts 163 in Emoji 17.0 overall. None of the sources reviewed for this article explain the 30-emoji difference — it may reflect sequences Samsung had already supported, or a different counting method. It is not, as far as anything published shows, a case of Samsung leaving eight designs out; all eight new characters are present.

The practical consequence of Samsung drawing its own artwork is that a One UI 8.5 phone and an iPhone showing the same message are displaying the same underlying characters through completely different illustrations. Neither is more correct than the other.

The New Samsung One UI 8.5 Emojis

What each one looks like in Samsung's set, and what is worth knowing about it on a Galaxy device specifically.

🫪 Distorted Face

Samsung draws it as a smiley warped as though squeezed. It is the most widely used of the batch across the internet generally, which means it is also the one most likely to reach you from someone else before you have the update — and therefore the one most likely to appear as an empty box on an older Galaxy. If you are seeing a rectangle in a group chat this year, this character is the usual culprit.

🫯 Fight Cloud

A dust cloud with limbs protruding, in the visual language of old cartoons. It is one of the few additions that depicts a situation rather than an object or a face, which makes it more useful in group conversation than its unusual appearance suggests.

🫍 Orca

A killer whale in profile. Samsung's ocean set already had a shark, a dolphin and a spouting whale, so this fills an obvious gap rather than opening a new category. Worth knowing if you use it for a sports team or a nickname: it renders at small sizes better than most animal emoji because the black-and-white shape stays readable when scaled down.

🫈 Hairy Creature

A bigfoot-style figure. Unicode's name is deliberately generic rather than naming a specific piece of folklore, which is why you will see it referred to by several different names. On Samsung it is a full-body character, so it loses more detail than a face emoji does at keyboard size.

🪊 Trombone

A slide trombone, added to a musical instrument set that had a saxophone, trumpet, guitar and violin but nothing from the slide family. Straightforward and unambiguous — one of the few in this batch with no interpretive baggage at all.

🛘 Landslide

Rocks and earth moving down a slope. It sits with the weather and disaster emoji rather than the landscape ones, and it is the most literal character in the batch. Its usefulness is mostly in news, weather and hiking contexts rather than casual conversation.

🪎 Treasure Chest

An open chest of gold coins. Gaming vocabulary in particular had been making do with the money bag and the gem for loot and rewards, and this is a closer fit — though many games strip emoji from names and chat entirely, which gaming symbols covers. It reads clearly at small sizes, which matters more than it sounds for an emoji that will mostly appear inside chat.

🧑‍🩰 Ballet Dancer

The only one of the eight that comes with skin tone options, because of how it is constructed. Samsung ships it with five additional skin tones alongside the default. If you use a skin tone modifier, be aware it makes the character longer in a way that matters in fields with tight limits.

How Samsung's New Emojis Look Different

The same character can look substantially different depending on who drew it, and One UI 8.5 also changed several emoji you already had — which is the part most people notice first.

Alongside the new characters, One UI 8.5 redrew a handful of existing ones. According to Emojipedia's One UI 8.5 changelog, the pizza lost its white onion and black olive toppings, the bank gained a large dollar sign above its entrance, the ship was reoriented to face left instead of head-on, the white flower lost the dotted markings at its centre, and the new moon face was reworked to look closer to a smirking expression — bringing it nearer to Google's interpretation.

None of this changes what you are sending. A redrawn pizza is the same character it always was; only Samsung's picture of it changed. Someone on an iPhone receiving your message sees Apple's pizza regardless. Our emoji collection goes into why the same character looks different from one platform to the next.

Read also: → Emoji Collection — browse and copy every emoji by category

How to Get the New Emojis on a Samsung Galaxy

Getting Samsung One UI 8.5 emoji onto your phone needs no separate download. There is nothing to install separately. Emoji arrive inside the system update, so the whole process is really just updating the phone.

1. Check which One UI version you are on. This lives in the software information section of Settings, though the exact path differs between models and One UI versions.
2. Check for a software update and install it if One UI 8.5 is offered for your device.
3. Restart when the update asks you to — the emoji font is part of the system, so it will not fully apply until the phone has restarted.
4. Open any app with a text field and bring up the Samsung Keyboard.
5. Open the emoji picker and either browse the categories or use its search.
6. Search for a name such as "orca" or "trombone". If the character appears, your phone has the new set.

Two caveats worth stating plainly. Samsung moves and renames settings between One UI versions, so it is safer to follow that sequence than to hunt for exact menu wording that may not match your device. And if One UI 8.5 is not being offered, there is nothing to force — the update either has reached your model and region or it has not.

Which Samsung Phones Support One UI 8.5 Emojis?

The honest answer is that availability varies by device, region and software rollout, and any list published at a single moment goes out of date quickly.

What can be said with reasonable confidence is the shape of the rollout. The Galaxy S26 series shipped with One UI 8.5 already installed. Samsung's own announcement then dated the wider rollout to other devices from 6 May 2026, expanding across the Galaxy range from there, and by the following month industry coverage reported it had reached the confirmed device list. Eligible models spanned recent flagship generations — the S23, S24 and S25 families, recent Z Flip and Z Fold models — along with a range of A-series, M-series and Tab S devices.

One technical detail explains some of the confusion about eligibility: One UI 8.5 is based on Android 16 QPR2 rather than plain Android 16. A device being eligible for Android 16 therefore does not automatically make it eligible for One UI 8.5, which is why some phones that received one did not receive the other.

Sources also disagree on the intermediate dates. Samsung's own newsroom gives 6 May 2026 for the expanded rollout, while some third-party coverage cites earlier dates in March for specific A-series models. Rather than pick one, treat the Samsung date as the reliable one for the broad rollout and accept that individual models and regions moved on their own schedules.

Why Can't I See the New One UI 8.5 Emojis?

Six causes account for nearly all of it, and they are worth separating because the fix differs.

• Your phone is on an older One UI version. The most common reason by a distance. No One UI 8.5, no new emoji font.
• The update has not reached your region or carrier yet. Rollouts are staged, and carrier-branded devices often lag unlocked ones.
• The update installed but the phone has not restarted. Fonts load at boot.
• The app is using its own emoji set. Several messaging and social apps ship their own emoji font and ignore the system one, so they will show their own artwork — or a box — regardless of your One UI version. Discord is a common example.
• You are seeing someone else's device, not yours. A screenshot from an updated phone will show the new emoji even when your own cannot render the character.
• The character exists but your font does not include it. This is the one people find least intuitive: a Unicode character can be perfectly valid and still have nothing to draw with, which is exactly what an empty rectangle means.

That last point is the one to internalise. Seeing an emoji rendered on a web page proves that that page could draw it, not that your phone can. The same applies in reverse — sending a brand new character to someone on an older device means they get a box, however current your own phone is. Anything that must be understood is safer in plain text characters, which render far more consistently than new emoji do.

Samsung One UI 8.5 Emoji vs Older Samsung Emojis

Three things separate Samsung One UI 8.5 emoji from the previous set, and only the first is what people expect.

• New characters. The eight new designs, plus the skin tone sequences, none of which existed in earlier Samsung sets.
• Expanded sequences. Multi-person skin tone combinations became available for People Wrestling and People With Bunny Ears — emoji that already existed but previously could not be varied that way.
• Redrawn artwork. A small number of existing emoji were changed, as described above. This is not a full redesign of the Samsung set; most emoji look exactly as they did.

It is worth being clear about that last point because "Samsung redesigned its emoji" gets repeated far more broadly than the evidence supports. A handful of designs were revised. The overwhelming majority were left alone.

One UI 8.5 Emoji vs Google and Apple Emoji

These are three interpretations of one standard, not three competing standards. When you send 🫍 from a Galaxy phone, you are not sending Samsung's picture of an orca — you are sending the codepoint U+1FACD, and the receiving device draws whatever its own font holds.

That is why an emoji can look cheerful on one phone and flat on another without anyone having made a mistake. It also means vendors ship on their own schedules: Google published its Emoji 17.0 designs shortly after approval in September 2025 and rolled them out gradually, Apple delivered them in a spring 2026 iOS release, and Samsung brought them to Galaxy devices through One UI 8.5. Same characters, three timelines.

This also matters beyond messaging. An emoji in a profile is read by whoever visits it, on whatever device they happen to hold — the social media hub covers which fields accept them on each platform, and the TikTok bio guide goes through how much decoration a short profile field can carry. Which set you prefer is a matter of taste and not worth arguing about. What matters practically is that a character your phone can draw is not necessarily one your recipient's phone can draw.

Every New Emoji in Samsung One UI 8.5

Every Samsung One UI 8.5 emoji added by the update is in the tables below — the complete set, not a selection. Nothing here is Samsung-specific once you copy it: you are lifting the codepoint, not the artwork, so the recipient sees their own platform's drawing. Tap any emoji in a table to put it on your clipboard.

The eight new designs

The genuinely new artwork, and the part most people mean when they ask what One UI 8.5 added.

Select any name in the following table to copy it.

Ballet Dancer, all skin tones

Six variants: the neutral form plus the five standard skin tones.

Select any name in the following table to copy it.

People Wrestling, all skin tone pairs

These are built as sequences — two people joined by the new Fight Cloud character — so every combination of two skin tones is its own entry. Read the grid as first person across, second person down the top row. The diagonal is empty on purpose: Unicode's Emoji 17.0 sequence list does not include matching-tone pairs for the gender-neutral version, so there are twenty entries here rather than twenty-five.

Select any name in the following table to copy it.

Men Wrestling, all skin tone pairs

Twenty-five combinations, laid out the same way. Here the diagonal is filled, because the matching-tone pairs do exist for this version — they are encoded with a single skin tone rather than two.

Select any name in the following table to copy it.

Women Wrestling, all skin tone pairs

Twenty-five combinations, with the matching-tone pairs again running down the diagonal.

Select any name in the following table to copy it.

People With Bunny Ears, all skin tone pairs

Same construction, joined by a rabbit face instead of the Fight Cloud. Twenty gender-neutral pairs, and the same empty diagonal for the same reason.

Select any name in the following table to copy it.

Men With Bunny Ears, all skin tone pairs

Twenty-five combinations, diagonal included.

Select any name in the following table to copy it.

Women With Bunny Ears, all skin tone pairs

Twenty-five combinations, diagonal included — the last group in the set.

Select any name in the following table to copy it.

That is the full Samsung One UI 8.5 emoji list: 154 copyable entries, being the eight new designs plus 146 sequences. It is worth understanding why the wrestling and bunny-ears groups are so large — each one is two people, and every pairing of two skin tones is a separate sequence, so a handful of base emoji expand into dozens of entries. This is exactly why emoji counts published for a release look so much bigger than the number of new pictures.

If any of the characters above appear as empty rectangles on the device you are reading this on, that device does not have a font covering Emoji 17.0 yet. The characters are still copying correctly — they will simply arrive as boxes for you too until the font catches up. For decorative text that renders reliably everywhere, the stylish font generator and the symbols library use far older character ranges with much broader support.