Several gun control activists have been campaigning to remove or modify Apple, Microsoft and Google's pistol emoji following a series of shootings in the United States. Although Apple has changed its realistic-looking pistol emoji to a bright green water gun in its recent iOS 10 update, it seems that Google chose to stick to the same pistol emoji.
According to Tech.Mic, Google announced at the inaugural Emojicon in San Francisco that it will not modify its gun emoji to ensure that ‘nothing gets lost in translation' in different devices and platforms. For instance, a user sends a water gun emoji but the receiver gets a pistol emoji.
"The thing is, emojis already look different on different platforms, and it does cause confusion. When we're dealing with guns and toys as a comparison, that's a whole new level of problems that we have there," Jeremy Burge, editor of Emojipedia told BBC News. Previously, he also suggested that instead of redesigning the gun emoji, it can just be hidden from the keyboard altogether.
"We believe in the cross-platform communication, so we are maintaining our gun," said Rachel Been, a Google art director who worked on Android emojis, according to Fortune.
Citing Apple's redesign of its gun emoji, Jean Hannah Edelstein, a columnist in The Guardian wrote: "It's a smart, small part in the battle - which we're presently losing - to keep Americans safe."
On the other hand, Microsoft has also changed its toy gun emoji to a revolver emoji as part of its Windows 10 Anniversary Update following Apple's announcement of modifying its gun emoji.
Apple, Google and Microsoft are all working with the Unicode Consortium - the body that maintains lists of emojis across different platforms. The consortium however, confirmed in June of this year that a planned rifle emoji had been dropped from a series of new icons.
