How to Get Rid of App Icon Badges that Won’t Go Away in iOS (Video)

Ok, so I know I can’t be the only one that this has happened to. You unlock your iPhone to see those familiar little red dots on your apps that let you know “hey, you missed something!”. You go through them and watch as they disappear one by one, like a mediphorical check mark on your phone’s virtual to-do list. But then, when you complete that one tasks and hit the home button expecting the app icon badge to go away, it’s still there.

If you’re like me you start to freak out ever so slightly, reopening the app and making sure the task it wanted you to do is done until you finally realize that the app badge is just stuck there. What seems like such a small problem, starts to slowly bug the crap out of you every time you subsequently check your phone and it’s still there, staring you in the face.

So what do you do to finally get rid of it? Well, there are a few options. Let’s go through them in order of effort and severity.

Update the App

Sometimes this is caused by an update to the app that you missed, so, especially if you don’t have auto-updates enabled, head to the App Store, tap Updates at the bottom right and update the app if there is one for it.

After that, hit the home button, open and close the app and see if it fixed the badge.

PHOTO

Force Close the App

If that didn’t work, let’s try and force close the app and then reopen it and see if that solves it (it worked for my issues with Google’s Inbox, for example, but not Waze).

1. Double click the home button to bring up the app switcher.

2. Find the app with the stubborn app icon badge and swipe up to close it.

3. Find the app on your home screen and open it again and see if the badge goes away after that.

Reboot the Phone

Now this might be everyones first go-to for fixing this, but I find force closing the app takes less time so I always try that first. If that doesn’t work though, a good old fashioned reboot might be what you need.

I’m not going to give you steps on turning off and then back on your phone, you know how, just do it.

Disable the App Icons

So with those three things done the next step is really if the darn thing is not getting fixed and you are so annoyed by the icon, it becomes time to get drastic –let’s disable the darn things entirely.

So I realize this isn’t the best solution for most, but for me it’s a solution for when I get so annoyed that I just can’t stand looking at my phone thanks to the tiny red dots that just won’t go away. And I usually reserve this for apps that I frankly don’t care if they have an app icon badge or not.

For example, do I need an app icon for Waze? I only need notifications from that when I’m driving, not something that is essentially a trick to get me to open the app so no worries if I remove that. And for others, the regular banner notifications and mentions in the notification center are good enough for me too, like with FourSquare where I’d like to know I’m close to a place with the notification, but have no need for it to tell me about places I’ve long passed that the badge is used for.

So if you are totally fed up here’s how to turn them off.

1. Go to Settings and find the guilty app in the long list of apps on that page and tap it.

2. Tap on Notifications.

3. Tap on Badge App Icon to turn them off (you can also turn off other notifications from the app if those are particularly annoying here too by tapping None in the Alert Style at the bottom).

Also, remember that for some of these its an issue that is solved once the developer updates the app so you can always turn them back on when that happens.

Hope this helped some people and let me know if you have other solutions!