A feature of the Messages app that I find absolutely indispensable is the ability to mute individual conversations that I don’t feel like responding to or receiving notifications from. This lets me continue receiving messages and responding to those I want while not being pestered by those that I’ve muted.
As great as this feature is, I’ve found that that missed messages from muted conversations still count against the Messages app’s notification badge count. This means that even if you’re trying to ignore someone in particular, the Messages still serves you with unwanted badge notifications for that specific conversation — and worse — bunches those missed notifications with others from the conversations you actually care about.
MShut is a newly released and free jailbreak tweak by iOS developer udevs that solves this problem, and it does so by preventing muted conversations from having any impact on the Messages app’s missed notification badge count. As a result, conversations that you’ve muted won’t give you the false flag that you’ve missed a message from someone that you aren’t trying to ignore.
So how does it work? It’s simple really… MShut automatically marks missed messages from conversations you’ve muted as read. Consequently, iOS won’t think they’re missed messages, and as such, doesn’t count them against the notification badge counter.
This method is highly effective at eliminating annoyances from those who can’t seem to take a hint that you don’t want to be messaged, but it does come with a particularly large drawback if you use read receipts. We’ll explain below:
Since the tweak is marking each incoming message as read to hide it from the notification badge counter, the sender will see that their message has been read. Consequently, they might think that you’re reading each one of their messages and not responding to it, so we’d recommend that you don’t use read receipts in tandem with MShut.
It’s worth noting that, once installed, MShut adds a preference pane to the Settings app:
Here, a few different options are presented to the end user, such as:
- Toggling MShut on or off on demand
- Allowing you to mark all messages as read from the Home Screen’s 3D Touch/Haptic touch menu
- Enabling or disabling the marking of all muted chats as read
Users may turn the bottom option off, however this will prevent the tweak from subtracting missed messages from muted conversations from the badge notification count. For that reason, we simply recommend disabling read receipts instead of using this option. The means aren’t perfect, but they certainly justify the ends.
Those interested in silencing muted conversations for good may download MShut for free from udevs personal repository via their favorite package manager. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS 13 devices.
If you’re not already using udevs personal repository, then you can add it to your package manager of choice with the following URL:
https://udevsharold.github.io/repo
Do you have any intention of giving MShut a try? Be sure to let us know down in the comments section below.
