The change will help mitigate misunderstandings when a user on one platform sends a water gun emoji and it appears as a pistol for users on a different one, and vice versa.

• Consistency is also why others, like Google's Android, chose to stick with their pistol-looking icon despite Apple's move at the time. (While the Unicode Consortium manages emoji, vendors are free to design their own as long as they match each icon's criteria.)

Still: Politics, and especially sensitivity to the recent gun control debate in the U.S., will likely begin to influence companies' tools and designs.