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Save 20% on the award-winning Audio Hijack with coupon code 6C20AH!By Jason Snell for Macworld
Apple’s emoji updates in iOS 10
Apple’s support for emoji across its platforms has been strong for a while now, and with the arrival of the most recent iOS 10 and macOS Sierra betas, we’ve gotten our first look at new symbols that everyone will have as options to use when the new versions of both operating systems ship this fall.
While emoji are a standard-a subcommittee of the Unicode consortium decides on the specification-they’re not as standardized as you’d think. Most amazingly, there’s no standard emoji imagery. Every platform vendor-operating-system manufacturers like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, but also web companies like Twitter and Facebook-has to commission its own illustrations of the emoji symbology.
That quirk came into view in the past couple of weeks, as Microsoft updated Windows emoji to turn their representation of the pistol emoji from a ray-gun into a more traditional police pistol, in line with all the other platforms… until days later, when the iOS and macOS betas turned Apple’s representation of a pistol emoji from a traditional gun into a green squirt gun.