How to Hide Red Notification Badges on Mac

If you find yourself bothered by the red notification badges—usually indicating that you have unread messages or emails—on app icons on your Mac, you can easily turn them off. We’ll show you how to quickly hide red notification badges on Mac.

macOS usually has two types of notification badges. There’s the simple red dot, and there’s another one that has a number inside. It’s useful to know that you have a couple of unread texts, but no one needs a daily reminder about 50,000 unread emails.

You can turn off these badges quickly by clicking the Apple logo in the top-left corner of your Mac’s screen and opening “System Preferences.”

In System Preferences, select “Notifications.” This has a bell icon with a red dot in the top-right corner.

Under Notifications, you’ll see a bunch of installed apps in the left pane. Select any app that’s been showing you notification badges and in the right pane, uncheck “Badge App Icon.”

You can repeat this process for all other apps that have been bugging you with these badges. Unchecking “Badge App Icon” gets rid of the annoying red notification badge while still allowing apps to send notifications.

Once you’ve done this, remember that you won’t have any indicator to remind you about unread notifications. If you miss a notification banner, you’ll have to open the app to see whether you’ve missed any messages.

Now that you’ve removed this annoyance from your life, you can get rid of notification badges on iPhones, iPads, and Windows PCs, too.

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