iOS new lil red dot

I was at an event last night where we had to guess how many unread text messages someone had on their phone. I was off by less than 25, and as a result, I won a cool prize (yay!). Additionally, I’ve had 1-800 numbers calling me nonstop the last few days about an overdue payment, which I’ve since resolved. Both of these things left me with notifications on my mind.

Notifications are a curse. I’m not sure when the switch flipped, but in middle school I wanted to be included in every new message and call. Now I want the madness to stop.

This all got me thinking about iOS and how it handles notifications. Every app has a little red dot with a number that slowly ticks up as your unread notification count increases. Apparently the maximum count for a badge on iOS is 60,000. Why they don’t let you run up to 99,999 perplexes me, but hey, I don’t make the rules.

What if there was another way? You can imagine an experience where instead of a numerical indicator, a new red dot without a number appears every time you get a text. Instead of this badge getting appended to the app icon, they could float in space, slowly stacking on top of each other over time.

This would be a great (albeit anxiety-inducing) way to motivate people to check their notifications. Yes, it would go viral and make a lot of people upset, but it’d be incredibly motivating.

Is the tradeoff worth it? Probably not.

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