Pixel UI may finally catch up to rival Android skins with a long-overdue notification tweak

Google recently rolled out Android 17 QPR3 Beta 2, bringing a handful of polish updates and tucked-away tweaks. While digging into the new preview build, we spotted code indicating that Google is preparing to let users customize their app icon notification badge styles, adding support for unread count numbers alongside the long-standing dot indicator.

Ever since Android 8.0 Oreo, Android has officially supported notification badges on home screen app icons to signal pending alerts. On stock Android and Google Pixel devices, however, that visual indicator has stubbornly remained a simple dot. While third-party UX skins like Samsung’s One UI have let users toggle between dots and numeric badges for years, Pixel Launcher users have had to stick with basic dots or disable them altogether. That limitation may finally change soon.

In Android 17 QPR3 Beta 2, we managed to manually surface an unreleased “Notification badges” menu nested beneath the existing notification dot settings.

Tapping through reveals a dedicated configuration sub-page with an illustrative preview banner up top, followed by three distinct options:

• Number: Displays the exact count of pending notifications right on the app icon.
• Dot: Keeps the classic circular dot indicator.
• None: Disables notification badging on icons entirely (without muting the actual alert).

While we could activate the settings page, the underlying implementation is still a work in progress, as the numeric badges do not yet appear on home screen app icons. We expect the feature to take clearer shape in subsequent QPR beta releases before it reaches Pixel users in the stable branch.