Recently iOS 18.7 received an incremental update. The latest build is 18.7.2. Unfortunately, with this update comes a pesky little bug when searching for emojis. From what I can tell, it does not matter what edit field you are on. Whenever you go to the emoji keyboard, and then try to search for a particular emoji, you will not get any results. It used to be that it would populate a list of emojis based on the letters you typed. Now it only displays your alpha numeric keyboard.
In other words, searching for emojis with this update is now impossible.
This is on an iPhone SE 2022, again running iOS 18.7.2. Those of you with larger screens, if you have better results, feel free to report back here.
Thanks for reading.