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.