Apple changed its pistol emoji from a handgun to a water pistol in 2016.
Apple’s redesign replaced the realistic-looking firearm with a bright green toy water pistol in its operating-system emoji artwork. The change was part of a broader period when technology companies reconsidered how weapons and other potentially sensitive images should appear in consumer software.
The underlying Unicode character did not change into a new weapon character. Unicode encodes the shared character, while Apple controls the glyph shown in its fonts and interfaces. As a result, the same pistol character could appear as a handgun on one platform and a toy water pistol on another.
Other vendors later made related design changes, but not all did so at the same time. This episode illustrates a key emoji fact: Unicode standardizes character identity and encoding, whereas platform makers control visual presentation. It also explains why screenshots from different devices can show noticeably different emoji meanings.