iOS 16 put empty red badge on phone app?

TidBITS Talk
1

My wife updated her 12 today to iOS 16. Now she has an empty red badge on her phone app that just won’t go away. Force quitting the app and rebooting the phone didn’t remove the empty badge. She’s on T-mobile and had the carrier deactivate her voicemail years ago so there’s no reason to show any voicemail badge and she’s never had any before updating to iOS 16.

Any ideas how to get rid of that empty badge? Removing the badge setting for the phone app notifications of course takes it away, but then she doesn’t get legit badge notification for missed calls.

2

Tapping on the recents and the voicemail tabs on the bottom doesn’t clear it?

3

Nope. Those were the first things she tried. Nothing. :frowning:

4

I’ve had a similar issue with Messages where deleting a message on one device does not remove the red badge notification from at least one other device. I found that recovering a message and then deleting it removes the badge.

Since your wife doesn’t have any voicemail to recover, you might try deleting one of the numbers from the Recent Call list and see if that removes the badge.

5

Have you tried calling her number and leaving a voicemail message?

Maybe receiving and deleting a message will clear the badge.

Also, check the screen with deleted messages. If you deleted one without listening to it, that might be a contributing factor.

6

As I wrote, there’s no voicemail on her account. Nothing to listen to or check or delete. Been that way for years, never an issue. Until now.

7

What happens if she misses a call, such that there should be a 1 on the icon? Does looking at that missed call in Recents just cause the 1 to go away but leave the red badge?

Also, what happens if you turn off Badges in Notifications > Phone? And maybe turn it back on?

8

We tried that. I called her and it went to missed. She got a 1 in the badge. She checked her missed calls and the 1 went away but the empty red badge remained.

Like I wrote, she can get the empty badge to disappear if she turns off badge notification, but the moment she turns it back on, that nasty empty red badge comes right back. Leaving badge notification off permanently stinks since that’s what tells her she has an actual missed call.

9

I wonder if it’s just because she has no voicemail set up? I’d say it would be worth a call to Apple just to see if that’s a thing.

10

What happens if she actually deletes a number from the call log (my original suggestion). I’m pretty sure that there are enough throwaway numbers from solicitations (political and otherwise) that she could delete at least one without harm.

I’m actually having badge difficulty in two areas:

  1. When I delete Messages, they actually delete on all devices, but at least one device still has the badge. I found that recovering a message thread from Deleted Messages and then deleting removes the badge.

  2. On one of Macs (but not the other) there is no badge on the Dock icon for Mail, I’ve tried using it to represent the unread count for different mailboxes, but it never appears.

11

I don’t have any voicemail set up either and it’s not an issue for me. Same iPhone, same iOS.

12

We tried that too. Removing the call from call log did not affect the empty badge.

13

Sorry for the repetition of mentioning something you’d already tried—I was reading too quickly.

I think this is down to calling Apple Support. :frowning_face:

14

Just saw this issue posted on Reddit, and the solution proposed:

Settings / Phone / Set Voicemail Password. Set a password, then use the same steps to clear it.

Not sure what happens if you do this without voicemail service; is that setting grayed out?

15

There is no voicemail when service is deactivated. There is nothing to set a password for a service that doesn’t exist.

16

So after 16.2 came along and unfortunately didn’t do anything for her empty red badge, I decided to bite the bullet and call up T-Mobile. I knew why I had hesitated all along to do that. I spent 75 minutes on the phone with 3 tiers of staff until they were finally able to flip on visual voicemail for her line. “The system’s been a bit fuzzy lately” is what the tier-3 guy told me. Lol.

Anyway, sure enough as soon as voicemail was activated on her line, the Phone app presented her with a widget to set up VV and as soon as that appeared, the empty red badge just went away.

Success at last! :slight_smile:

Now I’m going to start looking for excuses so I don’t have to call them right away to turn it back off. Let’ see how far I can kick this can down the road. :wink: Although, I want to tell myself just turning off a service they already activated can’t be as hard as finding a switch to turn something on. But heck, who am I kidding? :laughing:

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