Action Center was one of the big changes included in Windows 10 since it’s release. Acting as a hub for the toast notifications and alerts related to the UWP apps installed on your PC and other system apps, Action Center provides you the quick overview of what’s going on in the world of your apps and programs. If your Windows 10 Action Center Taskbar icon is not showing App icons, then this post shows how you can show or hide app icons in the Action Center icon.
Show or Hide app icons in Action Center
By default, app icons are shown on the taskbar, overlapping the Action Center icon for the fraction of a second, accompanied by the total number of new notifications stacked up in Action Center ready for you to dismiss them. The feature, in general, has proved to be quite useful where you can know beforehand whether which app has sprung up notifications, without even peeking into the Action center domain. I personally enjoy this feature a lot as I have my Windows Phone connected to the PC and it goes live whenever any notification arrives on my phone. The Cortana icon shows up on my PC telling me that I need to attend my phone to view the notification.
However, we have a couple of ways using which you can hide the app icons if that’s what you prefer. Follow the below methods in order to do so:
1] Using Action Center context menu
Quite the simplest one! Just right-click Action Center icon to pop up its context menu. Click/Tap “Don’t show app icons” in order to hide the icons as and when notifications comes in. While for turning them back on, you need to click “Show app icons” button. According to your settings, the same will be reflected whenever a new notification dives in.
2] Using Registry Editor
1. Hit Windows Key + R on your keyboard to open Run prompt, enter regedit and hit enter to open Registry Editor. Make sure you have created a system restore point before you go on to play with registry entries.
2. On the left pane of Registry Editor, navigate to the below path:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows CurrentVersion Notifications Settings
3. Right-Click Settings key and select New -> DWORD (32 bit) Value. Name the DWORD as NOC_GLOBAL_SETTING_GLEAM_ENABLED.
4. Double click and open the newly created DWORD and set its value as 0.
5. Click OK and close the registry editor. Now, restart the Windows Explorer process from Task Manager or alternatively, you can log out and log back in to make the changes effective.
6. Once back on with the changes, you’ll see that the app icons are turned off and it is also synced up the Action center context menu as well.
7. In order to turn on the app icons again, you just need to delete the DWORD created in step 3. Make sure to restart the Windows Explorer process to make the changes effective.
That’d be all, folks! Hope this helps you.