X Redesigns Water Pistol Emoji Back To A Firearm

X (fka Twitter) has quietly redesigned its 🔫 Water Pistol emoji to display as a firearm. This diverges from the cross-platform conversion of this emoji from firearm to water pistol from 2016 to 2018.

Keith Broni

• 2 min read
X Redesigns Water Pistol Emoji Back To A Firearm

The social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) has redesigned its 🔫 Water Pistol emoji to display as an actual firearm. This redesign diverges from the designs of all other major emoji vendors, inverting the cross-platform conversion of this emoji away from being a firearm between 2016 and 2018.

Above: comparison between Twitter's Water Pistol design and X's new redesign of this emoji as a firearm.

EDITOR'S NOTE: A further new design for the 🔫 Pistol emoji has since been released, and is shown below.

Above: comparison between the X 🔫 Pistol emoji design in July and then when redesigned in August.

This update is available through X's web client, which still displays the Twemoji emoji design set. It began its rollout on July 18th, the day after World Emoji Day 2024.

In February 2023 the Twemoji set ceased to be used by Twitter / X on mobile devices, replaced by the device's native emoji designs. This means this update will not be seen on Android devices.

The Twitter / X app for iOS has always used the native emojis provided by Apple.

However, the X engineer responsible for the change, kache, has since stated that they will be "soon updating the rendering on mobile".

They also stated that this design is "not the final design (going to make it look more badass)".

As mentioned above, this change by X in effect reverts a cross-vendor design change for the 🔫 Water Pistol emoji (fka the 🔫 Pistol emoji) that was fully implemented in 2018 following a much-publicized design change by Apple in 2016.

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Above: A comparison of pistol emoji designs from major vendors 2013—2018.

This is the first update to the version of the original Twemoji emoji design set used by X since July last year, when the designs of the 😷 Face with Medical Mask, 🥺 Pleading Face, and 🥹 Face Holding Back Tears emojis were updated.

Additionally, since October 2022 a separate branch of Twemoji has been maintained on former Twemoji designer Justine De Caires' Github. This offshoot remains open source and has had contributions made by Discord designers.

The 🔫 Water Pistol emoji in this Discord-used Twemoji offshoot remains as the design originally implemented on Twitter in 2018.

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