Best Practices for Android Badges with Numbers

Unlike iOS, standard Android (e.g., Google Pixel devices) does not support app icon badges with numbers. Standard Android only supports a basic notification dot.

Numeric badges only appear on custom firmwares (e.g., Samsung, Xiaomi) and behave differently depending on the device manufacturer's specific launcher:

• Status Bar Dependency: On devices like Samsung, the badge directly reflects the number of notifications currently sitting in the system status bar.
• The "Decrement" Issue: If you have 6 notifications in the status bar and you send a push with a badge value of 0 (or a decrement), the system will still show 7 on the badge because there are now 7 notifications in the status bar. The only reliable way to reset the numeric badge on these devices is for the user to manually remove all notifications from the status bar.

Recommendation: If you want to use numeric badges on Android, we strongly recommend sending badges only with "+1", without decrements (-1) or zeros (0). Trying to manage decrements on the backend will likely lead to incorrect and confusing numbers on the user's screen.