As your iPhone accumulates missed notifications, the icons on your Home screen become littered with little red dots indicating the number of missed notifications you have. Apple calls these red dots notification badges.
There’s no way to customize how notification badges look on a stock device, but if you’re jailbroken, then you can take advantage of a new jailbreak tweak called BadgeColors by iOS developer Cole Cabral.
BadgeColors colorizes your notification badges with the dominant color of the app icon that it represents. For example, badges on the Messages app would be green, badges on the Twitter app would be blue, and so on.
Right out of the box, BadgeColors intelligently changes the text color inside of your newly-colored notification badges such that it’s always legible against the background color.
Once installed, you’ll find a preference pane for BadgeColors in the Settings app where you can configure a couple of options:
Here, you can:
- Toggle the tweak on or off on demand
- Always force white badge text
- Respring your device to save changes made to the settings
Colorizing your Home screen’s notification badges to match the color of the app icon isn’t a new concept. We’ve seen tweaks that do this for just about every iteration of the iOS jailbreak, which speaks to its popularity. Personally, it’s one of my favorite small ways to tweak iOS; it’s subtle, yet defined.
If you’re interested in trying BadgeColors, then you can download it for $0.50 from Cydia’s Packix repository. The tweak works on all jailbroken iOS 10 and 11 devices.
Do you like it when your missed notification badges match the app they represent? Share why or why not in the comments section below.
