Apple iOS 10.2: Bacon, Shrug And 70 Other Emoji Are Coming

Today Apple released a developer preview of iOS 10.2. The developer preview version of iOS 10.2 arrived just a few hours after the iOS 10.1.1 public release. According to 9to5Mac, the beta of iOS 10.2 revealed several new features that are coming to iOS like three new wallpapers, a new widget for the Videos app, a Preserve Camera setting, a new “Press and Hold to Speak” menu under the Home Button Accessibility settings, a new “Celebration” screen effect for the Messages app, a new “Show Star Ratings” option under the Music app, a new headphone icon in the status bar for Bluetooth audio devices and new Unicode 9.0 emoji.

The Videos widget shows your videos from the camera roll in the Lock Screen. The “Preserve Settings” for the Camera app has several options: you can preserve the last mode such as Video or Square rather than automatically resetting to Photo, preserve the last used filter like Chrome rather than having the photo filter resetting to None, and you can preserve the Live Photo setting rather than automatically resetting to Live Photo turned on. The new “Press and Hold To Speak” feature under the Home Button Accessibility menu lets you select between Siri, Voice Control and Off. And the new “Show Star Ratings” feature under the Music menu lets you access star ratings from the action sheets for songs and the Star ratings do not affect “For You” recommendations.

Out of all the changes, I believe that the new emoji are the most highly anticipated. The iOS 10.2 developer beta added full Unicode 9.0 emoji, which includes 72 total emoji that were approved by the Unicode Consortium back in June 2016.