Android badge on app icon

How To Enable Or Disable App Icon Badges On Android

Jun 28, 2017
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When you get a new notification on Android, you get an alert on your lock screen. You can pull down the Notifications shade any time to view your unread notifications. If you want, you can enable an LED alert to accompany the alerts. On Android, you don’t have app icon badges. App icon badges tell you when you have unread notifications. An app icon badge shows you the number of unread alerts and it’s omnipresent on the app icon. It’s a simple way to tell, at a glance, if you have unread messages in the Gmail or Messages app. Come Android O, apps that choose to support them will now have app icon badges. You will of course have the option to enable or disable app icon badges for apps in Android.

App Icon Badges For All Apps

You can enable and disable app icon badges for all apps or for individual apps. Android O gives you complete freedom to choose which apps can add that extra bit of information on your Home Screen.

Open the Settings app and go to Apps & Notifications. Tap Notifications and enable or disable app icon badges by flipping the Allow icon badges switch on or off respectively.

App Icon Badges For Individual Apps

You can enable or disable app icon badges for individual apps. Open the Settings app and go to Apps & Notifications. Go to Notifications>Notifications. Tap the app you want to enable or disable. The app’s Notifications screen will have its own dedicated Allow icon badge switch. You can turn it on or off to enable or disable the app icon badge for that particular app.

App Support

This feature isn’t automatically added with Android O. The option to enable or disable app icon badges for apps is going to be there in the Settings app. That doesn’t mean the badges will show up on your home screen if you enable them. Apps, more specifically, app developers will have to add support for this new feature. You’re looking at an app update here. Given Android O is still in beta and we don’t even know what its official name is at present, there aren’t any apps that have support for badges at present.

Some apps have been able to figure out a way around this in the past. Case in point, the Facebook Messenger app with its floating app icon on the home screen. A lot of other apps have mimicked that approach. There are probably root solutions that will give you this feature on your Android phone right now but rooting now has its own problems where you’re locked out of apps like Pokèmon Go and Netflix. The default feature is going to be worth the wait.

8 Comments

I just updated to Oreo on my S8+ and I can’t get my Icon badges to show. I only have them turned on for Email, text messages and a weather app ( I live in Canada i need weather Notifications). I can’t figure out what I’m missing. Can anyone give me some advice.

“Android O gives you complete freedom to choose which apps can add that extra bit of information on your Home Screen”

FALSE. Android Oreo takes away every bit of control.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S8+ with Verizon, and I just got the Oreo upgrade.

This is kind of ironic, seeing as notifications were supposed to be the “big improvement” in this version. I am really anal about my notifications, because unlike many people, I don’t like things popping up on my phone and having it ding at me all the livelong day.

I have notifications turned off for everything except phone, text, and email. Phone calls and texts and pushed, obviously, and do make sounds. But I had email set to fetch and to not notify me, but still display an unread badge counter, so that when I’m actually using the phone, I’ll know I have unread emails. Basically, I want to know about it, but I don’t want it interupting my life. It was perfect.

Now it is all or nothing. In order to get the unread badge counter on apps, you have to have notifications 100% turned on for it, push, popups, displays on lockscreen, etc. The whole shebang. Otherwise, no unread counter.

To make matters even worse, once you clear the notification from the top pulldown tray, it wipes out the unread badge counter too! So, you want to make a notification go away and stop flashing at you so that you can read it later, but nope! Once you make it go away, it’s GONE forever–also clears the unread badge. Later, you have to remember that it actually happened!

I assume this is an improvement for Moto, LG, HTC, etc users who have stock Android and never had an unread badge counter, but for Samsung users, Touchwiz always had it, so this has screwed everything up royally!

Sorry to hear that you’re not happy with the update. I’m right there with you, it’s good to know I’m not alone! Hopefully enough of us speak out and things go back to the way we preferred em! 🙂

100% agree. Swipe away a notification and you can easily forget you have a message to look at LATER. Why did anyone think this was a good idea to REMOVE functionality without any control. Typical software developer that does not understand the real world usage. Samsung s8 – fail.

There isn’t a badge option on Samsung Galaxy devices through this method. Any other ideas? No other messaging app has this flaw on samsung devices

Hey Marshall I’m using a Galaxy S8 and a mandatory update installed this past Sunday(which I’m not liking btw). I’ve noticed that when I go into Notifications the 1st option is for icon badges and I’ve never noticed it before. I’m just happy we have the option to keep them off. That’s 1 microscopic example of why I enjoy my android devices much more than the apple lineup. Hope I helped out, happy hump day!

I’ve been avoiding the update because I’ve heard that on galaxy devices the update removes scrolling screen shot. (Screen shots longer than just the part of a page that’s viewed on the screen). Have you noticed scrolling screen shot is gone?

Hello, Fatima Wahab.
When you wrote this post the Android Oreo was still a beta and was not sure what the change would be in an app to support the notification badge.
Now, with the version already released, is it possible to know which change is necessary?
Thank you in advance.

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Exploring Android O: Notification Badges

Now the Android O APIs have finalised, Android O is just around the corner — which means we need to be sure our apps are filled with the latest goodies from the API. In this article we’re going to be taking a look at one of my favourite Android O features: Notification Badges 👌 I feel like these have been a long time coming, so let’s take a look at what these are and how we can use them in our app!

What is a notification badge you ask? Also known as ‘Dots’, these allow us to display a Badge (or Dot) on our applications launcher icon to notify our users that there is a pending notification that they have not yet acted upon.

These badges will automatically appear when a notification is received and disappear when there are no notifications that remain to be interacted with.

When the notification badge is showing, the user can perform a long press on the application icon to reveal a pop-up dialog that displays the notifications that currently exist for that app.

Personally for me this feels like a much better interaction point for notifications, meaning that I no longer have to reach all the way to the top of my screen to interact with notifications. It also allows me to see only the notifications I want to for a specific app, rather than being overwhelmed by notifications in the status bar.

Within this pop-up the user can interact with the notification (such as click on it) or swipe it away to dismiss it from the list of notifications. When the last notification is dismissed the notification dot will disappear from the notification icon.

You may have also noticed the number that is shown on the right-hand-side of the Notifications header section of the notification pop-up. Each new notification that is received in a any channel for the app in question will increment this number, as these notifications are dismissed the notification count will be decremented. This number can be manually overridden programatically — we’ll look at how we can do this in a bit 🙂

Notification badges might not be for everyone though! if this is the case then the user can tap on the ‘App Info’ button displayed in the notification badge pop-up, this will take them to the App Info screen for the given application.

At this point, the user has the ability to select ‘App notifications’ and from here toggle whether or not the notification badge should be shown for the given application.

When notification badges are disabled, notifications will still be shown in the status bar — the only difference is that no badge will be shown on the application icon.

When using notification badges, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to badge every type of notification from your app. For example, an ongoing process (such as listening to a song in Spotify) wouldn’t make sense to show as a notification badge, or any other kind of event that is something currently taking place (such as alarms or calendar events.

However, events such as messages in Slack, or a new email in Gmail, or when a post fails to go out in Facebook would make sense to show as a notification badge.

But how can we toggle what notifications are to be shown as badges and which ones aren’t? Well, that’s where we make sue of notification channels by grouping related notifications into fine-grained categories so that we can manage the badges for those channels individually.

Note: We’re not going to cover much to do with Notification Channels as I already covered it in this article if you wish to learn more:

Exploring Android O: Notification Channels

This week we saw the announcement of the first Android-O developer preview. One of the features of this announcement…

The default behaviour for notification channels and badges is that their notifications will be shown in the pop-up dialog and reflected by the badge shown on the app icon. If you don’t want to show the notification badge for the notification channel then you can use the setShowBadge() method to disable the display of the badge for the given channel.

Note: This behaviour change must be set before the channel has been created and submitted to the notification manager, changes will not be displayed if set after this point in time.

The Notification Builder used to build notifications now comes with a method called setNumber(). This method can be used to customise the number shown for the notification count when the user long presses on the application icon with the notification badge

You can use this notification count to display a custom value for the count of notifications. So for example, on the screenshot here you can only see a single notification but the count shows at 8. In this context, 8 could be the number of discounts available to the user (but I don’t want to show 8 notifications for that!). It would even work for things such as messaging applications, where you may want to display the number of messages received along with a notification to display that someone has messaged you.

If you don’t make use of this setNumber() method, then the notification count will be automatically incremented / decremented as notifications are received and removed.

By default the menu shown from a long press uses the Large notification icon. However, we can make use of the setBadgeIconType() method to set this to use a small icon (using BADGE_SMALL_ICON) instead if we wish 🙂

That’s all pretty neat isn’t it! Hopefully from this you can see just how easy it is to implement notification badges into your app. I’m looking forward to both adding these to any applications I work on, as well as using them in applications so that I can take a more fine grained approach to managing notifications for those applications.

Any questions or tips building on what we’ve looked at, I’d love to hear from you!

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Android badge on app icon

badge — add a badge to your tvOS/iOS/Android app icon

This gem helps to add a badge to your tvOS/iOS/Android app icon.

Yes that’s it. It’s built to easily integrate with fastlane.

Install the gem

Call badge in your projects root folder

It will search all subfolders for your asset catalog app icon set and add the badge to the icons.

You can also run badge on your Android, tvOS icons, or any other iconset. You have to use the —glob «/**/*.appiconset/*.» parameter to adjust where to find your icons.

⚠️ Note that you have to use a / in the beginning of the custom path, even if you’re not starting from the root path, f.ex. if your icons are in res/ios/beta/Appicon/* , your badge call would be badge —glob «/res/ios/beta/Appicon/*»

The keep the alpha channel in the icons use —alpha_channel

Be careful, it actually overwrites the icon files.

Here is the dark option (also available in combination with —alpha ):

You can also use your custom overlay/badge image

Add a shield at the top of your icon for all possibilites head over to: shields.io. You just have to add the string of shield (copied from the URL)

Sometimes the response from shields.io takes a long time and can timeout. You can adjust the timeout to shields.io with —shield_io_timeout 10 accordingly.

—shield_gravity North changes the postion of the shield on the icon. Choices include: NorthWest, North, NorthEast, West, Center, East, SouthWest, South, SouthEast.

—shield_parameters «colorA=abcdef&style=flat» changes the parameters of the shield image. It uses a string of key-value pairs separated by ampersand as specified on shields.io, eg: colorA=abcdef&style=flat.

In version 0.4.0 the default behavior of the shield graphic has been changed. The shield graphic will always be resized to aspect fill the icon instead of just adding the shield on the icon. To disable the new behaviour use —shield_no_resize which now only puts the shield on the icon again.

Add —no_badge as an option to hide the beta badge completely if you just want to add a shield.

Use badge —help to get list all possible parameters.

Usage with fastlane

Please use the fastlane plugin: https://github.com/HazAT/fastlane-plugin-badge It has the same parameters as this gem.

If Jenkins has problems finding imagemagick on your mac add following env variable to your job:

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