Facebook and Microsoft confirm plans to update their gun emoji designs to be more in line with Apple, Samsung, and Google; Microsoft shares water gun design
- Apple changed the design of the gun emoji into a squirt gun back in 2016. — At the time, it was a controversial choice, but tech companies have since followed suit.
Context & Ripple Effects
The squirt-gun redesign has been cascading across platforms since Apple swapped its pistol for a toy water gun in iOS 10 back in 2016 — a move critics called potentially dangerous precisely because the same character still rendered as a handgun on other platforms. Twitter removed that mismatch in April 2018 when it replaced its gun emoji with a water gun, explicitly cutting off one tool online abusers used to troll victims.
Google followed within days with the same change in Android P. With Facebook and Microsoft now confirming they will align too — and Microsoft sharing its water gun design outright — every major platform will render U+1F52B as a toy, closing the cross-platform inconsistency that was the original objection.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Microsoft users will see a water gun where a realistic handgun used to appear, ending the two-year stretch in which those platforms were the visible holdouts against Apple, Samsung, Google, and Twitter.
Second-order effects
- With full industry alignment, the 2016 safety critique — that a toy on one platform still reads as a weapon on another — loses its factual basis, removing the strongest argument against the redesign and making it harder for any remaining vendor to justify a firearm glyph.
Third-order effects
- Emoji design stops being a purely local aesthetic choice and becomes a coordinated industry policy on sensitive symbols — though the durability of that consensus is untested, as shown by X later reverting its water pistol back to a firearm on the web in 2024, proving any single platform can unilaterally reverse the norm.
The trend: Sensitive emoji designs are shifting from per-vendor idiosyncrasy toward de facto industry-wide policy set by the largest platforms first — a consensus that remains reversible by any single owner, as X's later revert demonstrates.