Owen Williams at the Next Web first spotted the new crop of emoji. There’s a middle finger and cheese emoji, among others. Once the emoji are made available by the consortium, companies including Apple, Google and Microsoft must then integrate them into their own systems. This followed Apple’s announcement at its event last September 9 that it will be launching the iOS 9 on September 16.

Emoji, those little images people insert into text messages, have long gone from smartphone oddity into communication necessity.

Meanwhile, aside from the unveiling of the iOS 9, Apple has confirmed a new pricing scheme for iCloud space. The iOS 9.1 update which will include all the mentioned emoji above does not have an official release date yet. Not to worry, the most exciting Apple news of the day didn’t even get mentioned on stage – new emoji is on its way.

Some users have already experienced a number of iOS 9’s pre-release features, such as an upgraded Siri, improvements to existing apps and smarter search, through a public beta program. But no-one will get to use a red-haired emoji anytime soon, which, once again, STILL DOES NOT EXIST. We are getting blessed with these new emoji thanks to an update to the Unicode standard earlier this summer.

If you want to take the new software for a spin anyway, it can be obtained by signing up for Apple’s beta testing website. Further aspects of this OS version on the iPhone 4S are shown and we can see for example that the new wallpapers are available.