Amazing! X Returns Water Pistol Emoji To Realistic Weapons

Illustration of gun emoji on various platforms (photo: dock. apple insider)

JAKARTA - User X found that after six years there had been drastic changes. When choosing a gun emoji now displays a picture of the original firearm rather than a water gun.

The existence of a particular emoji relies on the Unicode Consortium and its annual decisions, not special companies like Apple, Google, or Twitter. Each company has its own graphics representation design, and this time, X has shown that they dare to fight recognized industry standards.

According to Emojipedia, X has updated the emoji design for the word "gun" and turned it into a firearm image.

Pistol emoji appears to be the official emoji around 2010, and Emojipedia has a diagram showing its design since 2013. Initially, each company presented emojis as firearms, except Microsoft, which designed them as Buck Rogers-style beam weapons.

However, in 2016, Apple turned it from a firearm into a water gun. That's not the only change in emojis related to the firearms they did at the time.

In 2018, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook and Twitter all agreed with Apple. Each pistol emoji is different, but each is a picture of a water gun.

X himself hasn't announced this change yet, and as the emoji display is controlled by each platform, the old water gun emoji still appears on the iOS Twitter app. However, adding it through a browser gets a new firearm design.

The new design was reportedly launched in the X update on July 18, 2024. In July 2023, the company overhauled emoji, including the emoji "Pleading Face," but this appears to be the first intentional revision back to the idea of a previous design.

Separately, the Unicode Consortium is considering proposals for a new emoji. If approved, they will usually be added to Apple devices in a few months.