I’ve been hard at work on Blackbox for visionOS (check it out if you haven’t! The iOS version won an Apple Design Award in 2017 too!) but I took a little break recently to make a new toy app: Newji! Instead of waiting for official unicode emoji additions, now you can generate your own with a custom trained model my friend made, right from within iMessage even. I’d love if you gave it a try. It’s not quite done in my head but is too fun not to just share.

😋 Download Newji on the App Store

How I use it
Newji is meant to be a silly thing but I’ve been using it tons for custom stickers on Instagram and Discord and even some of my group chats. Like a lot of AI image models it works best with nouns, and the more descriptive the better! If it creates something strange, it’s useful to think through how your prompt could be misconstrued and when in doubt just run it again since the process is of course non-deterministic!

Privacy and more

We have a huge focus on privacy, don’t ask for any sort of login info, and keep everything as anonymous as possible. Unfortunately we can’t run the model itself on the device and there are server costs so we’re giving everyone 10 credits to start and charging what I hope are affordable prices after that. We are also using iOS 17’s background removal feature to cut the emojis out which works pretty dang well!

TL;DR: Try my new app Newji to create and send your own custom emojis!

I also have some big emoji credit promo codes I’ll happily share with anyone who shares their best animal hybrid emojis! Hello dragon puppy 🐲🐶