Everything We Know About iOS 18's New Genmoji Feature

Apple's iOS 18 announcement was jam-packed with AI features. Things like generative text, notification summaries, and a supercharged Siri are set to hit compatible Apple devices in later versions of iOS 18 as part of the Apple Intelligence program. To no one's surprise, AI-generated images are about to invade your iPhone, and Apple has a couple of different variations of this technology.

For starters, Image Playground lets you generate pictures from the ground up, using nothing but a text prompt. You can pick between three distinct art styles, and you can even choose a person from your photo library to be the highlight of the image. Genmoji is another exciting feature that leverages generative AI to produce custom emojis that you can use in conversations or as stickers.

What Genmoji promises is a more personalized experience when communicating with your friends or family, but how exactly does the feature work? Here's everything you need to know about Genmoji, and if your device supports the new AI tool.

Apple first dropped Animoji with the iPhone X back in 2017 — a feature that uses the Face ID cluster of cameras and sensors to analyze your facial muscle movements and matches them onto 3D emoji characters. We then saw the release of a more personal Memoji in iOS 12, which let users create their own animated avatars. 

Genmoji adds to this experience and allows for a more creative way to have conversations on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The feature lets you describe a custom emoji using a text prompt, generate it, and make it seamless to use in text messaging or as stickers. Like Image Playground, you can create Genmoji of people from your contacts list. 

Any Genmoji you create are then readily available for future use in the emoji keyboard on your Apple device and can be copied and pasted like regular text. Since this requires on-device support for AI, only iPhones compatible with iOS 18 that support Apple Intelligence will be able to generate Genmoji — namely, the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, and the latest iPhone 16 series. Macs and iPads with Apple's M-series of chips are also compatible with Apple Intelligence. 

Since emojis are based on the Unicode standard, and how they appear depends on the viewing device, the existence of a feature like Genmoji might seem a little confusing. Genmoji are essentially personalized images, but ones that conform to text formatting principles. This is what makes them as easy to use as regular emojis, since Genmoji can be inserted in-line with text, and change their dimensions based on the font size.

All of this is possible thanks to the NSAdaptiveImageGlyph API, which houses images as a data object that can be adapted to various resolutions. This means any app that supports the Rich Text Format for messaging or text input will be able to display Genmoji without breaking a sweat. While app developers will have to add access to this feature, it is as simple as enabling a single flag in the app's codebase.

For devices or apps that don't support rich text formatting, Genmoji can use its metadata characteristic to send a textual description of the custom emoji instead.