Apple Being Urged to Rethink Changing Gun Emoji to Water Pistol

Earlier this week, Apple highlighted in a press release how it has added more gender diverse emoji in iOS 10, while also showing off the water pistol emoji it has used to replace the handgun emoji. However, the company is now being urged to rethink its plan to get rid of the handgun emoji symbol, as Emojipedia has explained how the water pistol would still appear as the handgun emoji in messages sent to non-iOS users (via Daring Fireball).

So if Apple goes ahead with this change in the public iOS 10 release, one person could innocently tweet a toy and have that be seen by others as a weapon, as shown above. A better solution for Apple, as suggested by Emojipedia, would be to hide the handgun emoji instead of changing it. The pistol emoji could be removed from the iOS emoji keyboard without causing any cross platform compatibility issues.

As John Gruber puts it:

“Hiding the pistol from the emoji keyboard is timid. Changing it to a toy is a statement, indicating that Apple wants no part of the gun culture here in the U.S. I support Apple changing this glyph to a toy — but if they do otherwise, they should drop the glyph completely, and display the “missing glyph” box for the pistol’s code point”.

Ironically though, Microsoft switched Windows’s pistol emoji from a toy ray gun to a realistic revolver earlier this week. Take a look by clicking here.