Facebook tests letting you finally mute notification dots

Facebook gets a lot of flack for its Android client. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t encounter another annoying bug concerning notifications. I occasionally get delayed or duplicated notifications. In-app indicators are often messed up too. Now, Facebook is finally taking some steps to at least hide these annoying in-app notifications. New reports show that they’re working on a feature to disable in-app Notification Dots on category tabs.

The feature was first leaked by Android app reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong. As you can see in the screenshot below, Facebook will soon let you disable Notification Dots for all four category tabs: Groups, Marketplace, Profile, and Menu. Though, keep in mind that due to the fact that Facebook does a lot of A/B testing, you may have a different set of tabs. For example, I have Videos on Watch instead of the Marketplace.

Facebook is testing the ability to toggle Notification Dots of the specific tab in the app

This should address the long annoyance of tabs showing notification dots that don't spark joy for the user pic.twitter.com/vtBLkbjKtE

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) June 1, 2019

Jane enabled the feature manually, but some users have recently started noticing the mentioned feature in their Facebook apps. Matt Navarra was the first person who noticed the feature in the public build of Facebook. Based on his screenshots, the app now also allows you to completely mute not only Notification Dots, but push notifications too. You can also mark all notifications as read from now on.

OMG…! Thanks Facebook!

– Mute push notifications toggle!
AND
– Mute notification red dots toggle!!
AND
– Mark ALL notifications as read!!! pic.twitter.com/sbIdjfOIwu

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) June 25, 2019

TechCrunch also contacted Facebook who confirmed that this feature is from the well-being team. The main focus is to help people spend time more rationally in the social network. You can check the availability of the feature by going to Menu > Settings & Privacy > Settings > Notifications > Notification Dots. Here you can toggle the dots for each group separately. As of now, we have no estimated date of release, nor an APK to share as this is an A/B test.