Temporarily clear app icon badges with BadgeCleaner

badgecleaner clear badges or open app

If you’re like me, then you probably get several notification badges on your Home screen app icons all the time because people want to talk to you or because apps want to share stuff with you.

Unfortunately, if you launch the app just to get rid of the badge, the notification is gone for good and you might forget to look at it later.

Available now to solve this problem is a new free jailbreak tweak called BadgeCleaner, which can be had from Cydia’s BigBoss repository. This tweak lets you easily clear app badges without dismissing the notifications the app might have waiting for you.

Hiding badges with BadgeCleaner

Although notification badges can be disabled outright from the notification settings of any app installed on your device via the Settings app, this method means you’ll never receive any Home screen badges for that app again.

I’ve found that disabling the feature outright is less satisfying than just temporarily hiding the badges with a tweak like BadgeCleaner, because my mood on the matter shifts almost constantly. One moment I might not want to see any notification badges at all because they’re annoying me, and another moment I might feel like hiding the less important badge notifications so I can check the important ones later when I have the time.

With BadgeCleaner installed, any time you attempt to launch an app with a notification badge on it, you’ll get the option menu shown above. The two options are to clear the app’s badge notification, or to open the app as you normally would (you can also tap cancel to do nothing).

If you tap on the Clear Badges button, the tweak will hide the badge notification from the app icon, but it will not dismiss the notification. What this means is you can still open Notification Center after clearing your app badges for a certain app, and you’ll still see the notifications for that app that you’ve missed.

In the example below, we’ve cleared the notification badge from the Messages app, but the notifications still appear in Notification Center so we’ll be reminded of them later on:

badgecleaner notification center

Another thing to keep in mind about BadgeCleaner is when you clear the notification badge from an app and get new notifications afterwards for the same app, the badge will not only reappear but it will add together the amount of notifications from the cleared badge and the new notifications you’ve received.

For example, say you had 4 missed text messages, and you clear the notification badge from the Messages app. Now, you should have no badge at all, but if you get 2 new messages the badge will reappear and it’ll show the number 6 (4 + 2 = 6+.

Configuring BadgeCleaner

BadgeCleaner, as simple of a tweak as it is, doesn’t really have any settings to configure. On the other hand, you can use the toggle switch the developer includes in the tweak’s preferences pane in the Settings app to easily enable or disable the tweak on demand.

badgecleaner preferences pane

My thoughts on BadgeCleaner

BadgeCleaner is a tweak I would use on a daily basis because of the sheer number of notification badges I get in the middle of a busy day. With this tweak, I would easily be able to hide the notification badges that were less important to me, and then by the time I can unlock my iPhone again, I’ll only see badges from the apps I deemed important enough to show them.

What I really like about this solution is that it’s not permanent. I like badge notifications; I just don’t like a lot of badge notifications cluttering my Home screen at one time. This tweak works great for temporarily disabling badges for a specific app you have notifications for when you don’t have the time to look at them, and it helps you keep a sense of priority for other apps trying to notify you.

I particularly like the tweak’s activation method – it’s smart enough to know when an app you’re trying to launch has a notification badge, so fortunately, you won’t have to deal with an annoying pop-up message each and every time you try to launch an all – you’ll only see it when the app you’re trying to launch has a notification badge waiting on it.

Although for some people, simply disabling badges for apps seems like the easier answer, I feel that it prevents you from seeing an overview of missed notifications from the Home screen altogether. I personally prefer being able to sort and pick and choose for myself what’s more important, and that’s what BadgeCleaner allows me to do.

Conclusion

For a quick way to hide notification badges from apps on your Home screen, BadgeCleaner is a great free jailbreak tweak you can download for free from Cydia right now to get the job done.

What are your thoughts on BadgeCleaner? Share in the comments!