Good news: it’s easy to turn off any annoying alert badges on your iPhone’s home screen, provided you know where to look.
Note: this tip will also work on the iPad or iPod Touch.
The trick: digging into the relatively new (and needlessly complicated) “Notifications” settings, which control all your iPhone’s various banners (you know, the ones that occasionally appear along the top of the screen) and pop-up alerts.
All set? Here we go…
- Tap the Settings icon on your iPhone home screen, then tap Notifications. Once you do, you’ll find two lists of apps; the first list covers all the apps that appear in the iPhone’s “Notification Center” (a summary of recent alerts that you can flick down from the top of the screen), while the second list ticks off the apps that…well, aren’t in Notification Center.
- Now, let’s say you want to turn off the red badge for the iPhone’s Facebook app. Scroll through both Notification lists until you find the entry for Facebook, then tap it.
- You’ll now see all the notification settings for Facebook, including whether it’s including in Notification Center (you can switch that setting on or off, if you wish), how its alerts appear on the screen (as banners along the top of pop-up windows that need to be dismissed), and—here we go—whether a little red badge with the number of pending alerts appears on its home-screen icon. To zap the badge, just switch the “Badge App Icon” setting to off.
- While you’re at it, you may want to turn Facebook’s sound alerts on or off (just tap the “Sounds” switch), or tweak the setting for whether Facebook alerts appear on your iPhone’s “lock” screen (tap the “View in Lock Screen” switch.)
- Finished? Tap the Home key to return to the home screen.
Don’t want any red badges on a particular app icon? Just switch the “Badge App Icon” setting to “off.”