We’ve all been there at one point or another; you unlock your iPhone with the intention of checking the weather or sending a quick text, only to be greeted by a sea of little red circles.
They’re everywhere, screaming for your attention like a digital toddler until you open the app and clear it. It’s a core part of the iOS experience, sure, but after years of staring at these tiny stress-inducers, I’ve had enough. The problem? I can’t really do much about it.
App badges are my worst enemy
The problem with app badges is that they are designed to be addictive. They’re pitched as helpful reminders, but in reality, they’re designed to draw you into an app to see what’s “new,” even when there’s nothing of substance actually waiting for you.
Every time I unlock my iPhone and see a bunch of badges on my home screen, I’m immediately distracted. Instead of doing what I actually set out to do, I find myself mindlessly scrolling through a feed just to make the number go away.
It’s even more infuriating when the badges refuse to leave. We’ve all dealt with that one stubborn app – it’s the Oura app for me at the moment, oddly enough – where you’ve cleared every notification, read every message, and checked every update, yet the badge remains.
For a company that prides itself on “clean” design, the home screen often looks like a messy desk covered in red Post-it notes.
No, I’m not going to disable them one by one
Now, I know what the power users among you are going to say, “Just go into Settings and turn them off!” And yes, technically, you can.
But, there’s the catch: Apple forces you to do it on an app-by-app basis. I have hundreds of apps installed on my iPhone, and the idea of diving into the notification settings for every single one of them to toggle off “Badges” leaves me in a cold sweat – and besides, it’d take the better part of an afternoon.
It begs the question: why isn’t there a system-wide toggle? Apple gives us “Silence Unknown Callers” and “Focus” modes to reclaim our digital sanity, yet it won’t give us a single master switch to kill the red dots. It’s a bizarre omission when you really think about it, especially for an operating system that is supposed to be the very pinnacle of user-friendliness.
Android fixed the issue years ago
What makes this even harder to swallow is that our friends over in the Android camp solved this ages ago.
On most Android skins, app badges (or “dots”) are intrinsically linked to the notification shade. If you swipe away a notification because you’ve seen it and decided it’s not important, the badge on the app icon vanishes too. A system that, in my mind, makes a lot of sense.
On iOS, the badge and the notification centre live in two completely different worlds. You can clear your entire lock screen, but those red circles will stay pinned to your icons until you manually open the app.
At the very least, Apple should give us the option to mirror that Android-style functionality in the Settings menu for those of us who find the current system a little bit archaic.
It probably won’t change any time soon
As much as I’d love to be optimistic, I’m not holding my breath. With the reveal of iOS 27 scheduled for WWDC in early June, the rumour mill is buzzing about the long-awaited reveal of the Gemini-powered Siri and even more powerful AI features, but a badge overhaul is nowhere to be found.
Badges have been a staple of the iPhone since the very beginning, and despite Apple redesigning the notification system multiple times over the last decade, they’ve remained largely untouched. It seems Apple is perfectly happy with the status quo, even if it means our home screens remain a cluttered, distracting mess for the foreseeable future.
Please, Apple, prove me wrong.
