Welcome to 995 Mac Daily for Thursday, July 17th, 2025.

I'm your host, Chance Miller.

We are sponsored this week by OnePassword.

Leading off today, Apple is expanding its collection of Apple News Plus puzzles with yet another new game.

This time, Apple is tapping into something we all know and love,

emoji. This new emoji game was initially announced as part of iOS 26 at WWDC. The game, however,

is now rolling out to all iPhone users running iOS 18.4 and later, as well as iPadOS 18.4 and

MacOS 15.4. Apple explains that the emoji game

challenges players to use a selection of emoji to fill in the blanks of short phrases with as few

moves as possible. Each phrase is accompanied by a clue, which you can choose to reveal, but that

will count towards your total number of

moves. It's a bit hard to explain verbally, but you can hit the link in the show notes for a demo

of how exactly it works. Results can be shared via Game Center, messages, mail, and other apps.

An emoji game will also integrate with the Apple Games app coming later this year with iOS 26.

Interestingly, emoji game utilizes Apple Intelligence and Gen Moji.

Some of the emoji characters you'll see throughout the game were generated using the Gen Moji feature,

and they aren't just normal Unicode emoji characters.

The emoji game joins Apple's other puzzle games, including the Crossword, Crossword

Mini, Core Tiles, and Sudoku.

New emoji game puzzles will be released on a daily basis.

The game is available in the United States and for English-speaking users in Canada.

Apple is quickly building a robust set of these daily games and puzzles,

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