Apple criticized for bringing toy gun to emoji battle

The BBC reports that Apple has come under some criticism for replacing their gun emoji with a version that looks like a water pistol.

“The thing is, emojis already look different on different platforms and it does cause confusion,” Jeremy Burge, editor of Emojipedia, told the BBC.  “When we’re dealing with guns and toys as a comparison, that’s a whole new level of problems that we have there.”

While Microsoft has recently changed their own gun emoji from a stylized ray gun to a generic revolver, to “map to industry designs or our customers’ expectations of the emoji definition” Apple went the other direction by changing their gun to a water pistol in a response to gun violence.

Emojipedia argues that the symbol may cause confusion when sent to non-iOS devices, with potential dangerous consequences.

“Apple has the most prominent emoji set that people use,” said Mr Burge. “I think it has a high responsibility to be a bit cautious.”

Microsoft and Apple have previous cooperated on having the proposed rifle emoji dropped by the Unicode consortium.

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