Water gun

[Madis0]

:apple: :gun: :sweat_drops: (click)

I would suggest a green, extra balloon-less one for consistency.

[C1710]

This is actually an issue I wanted to open myself 😅
I already made a water gun emoji but I implemented it using custom ZWJ sequences.

Anyhow I'm not sure about the best solution.
There are about three/four different options:

1. Leaving it as it is right now.
   + The water pistol would be somewhat accessible and you can choose either the real or the toy pistol.
   - Since most keyboards and OSs (what's the plural of OS? :joy:) don't support raw Unicode input it would be very difficult to handle this
2. Make the water gun the default.
   + It would be consistent with most of the current emoji sets
   - It would not comply with the Unicode standard (see @Chrissov's aka Informoji's tweets/comments on this topic - or one tweet by \@FakeUnicode)
   - Many devices (yes, I'm looking at you, Android) don't get the latest emoji set which would still potentially lead to confusion. (okay, that's already the case)
3. Provide two versions. + People would get to choose their favorite style
   + You could provide both in EmojiCompat
   - If someone provides only one font (which is the case in this Magisk module and currently in my Blobmoji Preview app) you can't choose
4. Make a weird combination of a water real gun or just remove this emoji
   • Well, I'm not sure if this would be a solution anyone likes :P
5. Wait for Unicode to fix this.
   - I don't think this will happen

So all in all I think, I'll go for solution no. 3. I might also change the font in that version as it would be some kind of "super compatibility" version 😂

[C1710]

Oh - another probalby very stupid solution would be to make it an emoji sequence - without the ZWJ.
The one huge problem would be that you couldn't see 💦 🔫 (or the other way round) as two emojis but only as one emoji. And it wouldn't change anything on the issue of receiving messages of people using other fonts.

[Madis0]

That water gun looks nice.

Not sure how much confusion it would make, but you could provide two versions with real gun being the default now and water gun being the default when P gets released. That would be consistent with Google's intentions.

Perhaps make the real one a combination of :gun: :bomb:? Although that could again be misinterpreted as a water bomb, if it is near a water gun :grin:

what's the plural of OS?

I believe it is "OSes" :grinning:

[Madis0]

Theoretical other combinations, though they don't make much sense:

• 🔫⚔️
• 🔫🏹
• 🔫🔪
• 🔫🗡️

[C1710]

This is what I meant with "making the toy gun the default".
But I'd opt for 💣🔫 because the bomb would then represent the bullet.
I'm not very sure about this issue but I'll probably offer both versions.
I mean, if you get this font into your OS, you're able to use the other version as well.
And regarding EmojiCompat: I released a new File based configuration for this which makes it possible to exchange the emoji font without having to wait for the app developer to do so.
I guess, this will also be one of the options in Tusky.

[jobukkit]

🔫💀 would be another option

[jobukkit]

Here's an idea... A gun and a water pistol have roughly the same sillioutte, so you could display an outline/sillioutte by default, and then show a gun for the 🔫💀 (or 🔫💣) ZWJ sequence, and a water pistol for the 🔫💦 ZWJ sequence.

[C1710]

I don't actually like this outline solution. In the end this is also supposed to be an emoji font that looks nice.
A blank silhouette wouldn't look very nice I think.

[jobukkit]

It's still preferable to this... 😟

(From https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/)

[C1710]

I'm totally aware of all this problem.
I'll see what I can do...

[Madis0]

By the time Google releases it, all relevant emoji sets will have transitioned anyway. (For context, most sets on the bottom have been discontinued)

Then, the problem will only be in old devices, but that's not something you can fix anyway...

[C1710]

So what do you think about this one? It's based on the water pistol but it has the color of a real gun (except for this green part).

[jobukkit]

I don't know for sure about a hybrid gun/water pistol... In the case of this design, I would have simply recognized it as a slightly odd gun. It could be a solution in theory, but it's fairly outlandish because these two objects have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It's like trying to combine the shark and tiger emoji's.

Another option would be to display a gun and a water pistol side by side in the same glyph.

Though that would make absolutely no sense to anyone who doesn't know about this debacle.

Sigh.

[C1710]

So this is my last attempt to make some kind of hybrid version.
You could either interpret it as a very cartoonish gun or as a toy gun.

[C1710]

But I think it would be better than having to enforce one style.
Not being able to change older device's fonts doesn't mean these users can be ignored.
So using a hybrid version would probably be the best solution.

[C1710]

[C1710]

I made a new branch including the new hybrid gun 43616539454a66b5430bd85454654f045487f53a

[jobukkit]

Wow, I actually like that design! It really can be interpreted as either. I'm impressed!

[C1710]

So I guess, I'll close this issue now...

[April93]

Just wanted to say, the proper solution is to properly display the character as a legitimate and real firearm, and leave squirtgun as either it's own codepoint, or as an unofficial ZWJ that not everyone supports.

[C1710]

And that's the problem: Some prefer the water gun because it's more consistent to the major emoji vendors (now including @Microsoft) and some prefer to stick to the Unicode standard.
I know that this hybrid version is not a perfect solution, but I think it's the best solution currently possible.
This ZWJ solution is of course very nice in theory and it's the one I originally used, but there's one problem: IME.
Even if the user knows that there's a custom ZWJ sequence for the water pistol (1F52B 200D 2063 FE0F), they can't type it using their regular Android or Windows* device as they don't have a native Unicode codepoint input.

*Actually Windows has Unicode codepoint input, but you can't use it without a numpad.

[C1710]

And BTW I still think the most "perfect" solution would be to have two codepoints in the Unicode standard.
But even this one would cause problems as there would be many devices remaining without these additional codepoints which would still cause the same problems as we have now.