The update includes over 70 new emoji characters such as animals, mythical creatures, clothing options, and more. Among the highlights are a vampire, crazy face, pretzel, pie, T-rex, and a mermaid.
They’re part of Unicode 10, the encoding standard hashed out by the eponymous Unicode Consortium. It’s a surprisingly complicated process: Every calendar quarter, the Consortium’s 12 major voting members — a group that includes Oracle, Google, Facebook IBM, Apple, and Yahoo, among others — take recommendations from the public and propose letters, digits, symbols, and emoji for revisions of Unicode.
The update also comes with some small design changes for several emojis. You might notice the bee, snail, dolphin, and others are now somewhat different. The new designs are more realistic and detailed than prior versions.
The Photos app on iOS 11 has received improvements as well. Issues with blurry photos, Live Photo Effects, and swiping between screenshots have been addressed or resolved. The update has also fixed an issue which saw some photos not displaying in the People album when users restored their device from an iCloud Backup.
The Reachability bug that has been around since the initial release of iOS 11 has now been fixed, too. It also brings back the 3D Touch App Switcher — which allows iPhone users to perform a 3D Touch gesture at the left edge of the display and bring up the multitasking App Switcher.
There’s also a built-in keyboard feature that offers a variety of emoji symbols when typing in a specific word. For example, when you type in the word “love,” your suggestions will pull up three different types of heart emojis to use. Other new features include a new camera icon under the Restrictions section, and new animation for the lock screen as well as when tapping the status bar to scroll up.
With the release of iOS 11.1 also comes bug fixes and security improvements. One of these specifically addresses the prior exploit that allowed hackers to access all modern Wi-Fi networks — known as KRACK.
Update: Apple releases 11.1 with new emoji symbols and several other features
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