Google and Facebook have also joined other tech giants by changing their pistol emojis into a water gun. The changes have already been made accessible to Android users. Facebook confirmed that the toy squirt gun will soon be replacing the pistol emoji after consulting with the Unicode Consortium. Apple was the first one to change it when it removed the handgun emoji in 2016 and swapped it with bright green toy water gun. Later on Whatsapp, Twitter, and Samsung also followed the same footsteps set by Apple. Currently, Microsoft is the only one who still has the realistic handgun emoji in its list.
It is pretty ironic that initially, Microsoft had a 50s style ray gun emoji from 2013 to 2015. But later in 2016, the software giant started using the pistol emoji instead of the ray gun. Microsoft said that it switched the pistol so that the emojis will appear properly on all the platforms. However, since every major tech has moved or is planning to move to water gun emoji, Microsoft is expected to make its move as well. Among all the platforms, Google has changed its gun emoji most frequently. In 2016, Google told Emoji Wrap that it was conscious to swap to the bright green water gun since it wanted to be compatible with other systems as well.
Since almost all the companies have now adopted the water gun, all others are also adopting the change. Google faced another controversy regarding its burger emoji in the past. When Apple and all other companies designed their cheeseburger emoji with cheese on top of the patty and Google’s cheeseburger had cheese under the patty. In this case, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said that he will drop everything to correct the issue and later changed the emoji in Android 8.1.