Apple has decided to remove the revolver emoji from its iOS lineup. The US has seen a lot of gun related violence over the last year, so its easy to understand this decision.

The change won’t happen immediately though, as the patch will only be rolled out to users when iOS 10 makes its appearance later this year.

The revolver will instead be replaced with a brightly coloured water pistol – which has clearly been designed to resemble a toy.

The swapping of the revolver for a pistol is only one of two non-gender emojis to get a bit of a refresh. Apple explained that with iOS 10, a healthy dose of emojis will be redesigned to better reflect gender diversity.

“More than one hundred new and redesigned emoji characters will be available to iPhone and iPad users this fall with iOS 10. This exciting update brings more gender options to existing characters, including new female athletes and professionals, adds beautiful redesigns of popular emoji, a new rainbow flag and more family options,” it explained in a blog post.

Apple added that it has been working with others in hopefully making the changes universal across all other mobile platforms, like Android.

“Apple is working closely with the Unicode Consortium to ensure that popular emoji characters reflect the diversity of people everywhere,” Apple said.

It does make one wonder though; will (or should) Apple replace the bomb, the dagger and the swords with something else? Just like the revolver, the dagger and the sword really only have one purpose.

But this isn’t the first time that Apple has stepped in to make changes to its emojis.

In June the company successfully lobbied Unicode to not have a rifle emoji included. Microsoft agreed with Apple, and the rifle never made it onto any smartphone.

The new emojis that will be included in iOS 10 will be:

[Image – CC by 2.0/Andy Field]