App badge on the iOS Home Screen icon

Behaviour · Measured 2026-10-20, iPhone 16 Pro, iOS 18.6.2 (22G100) · S, Screenshot or recording · Agrees with WebKit

The Badging API lets an installed web app put a count on its icon. On 2026-10-20, navigator.setAppBadge() drew the count on an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.6.2 (22G100), in a Home Screen web app with notification permission.

When an iOS Home Screen web app that holds notification permission calls navigator.setAppBadge(n), does the count appear on the app’s Home Screen icon?

Badge counter and captures

The test app is the OpenPWA demo, added to the Home Screen from Safari. Its Badging page (/demo/badging/) keeps a counter: each tap on Increment and set badge adds one and calls navigator.setAppBadge(counter), so three taps call it with 1, 2 and 3. The app had been granted notification permission earlier in the run (notebook N41).

We recorded:

• the Home Screen icon after the third call, in an operator screenshot whose capture time comes from its EXIF data;
• the app’s notification settings page (Settings → 通知 → OpenPWA), in a second screenshot;
• 'setAppBadge' in navigator and 'clearAppBadge' in navigator in a Safari tab and in the Home Screen app, by instrumented reads.

The inspector page list was empty during the badge step, so the agent session could not read the page at that moment (N43); the badge itself rests on the screenshot.

How to run

1. In Safari on the iPhone, open https://openpwa.net/demo/, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen, then Add.
2. Launch OpenPWA from its icon, open the Push page and tap Request permission and subscribe, then Allow. The badge is tied to notification permission on iOS.
3. Open the Badging page and tap Increment and set badge three times.
4. Go to the Home Screen and take a screenshot of the app’s icon.
5. Optional: in Settings → Notifications → OpenPWA, check that Badges is on.
6. Back in the app, tap Clear badge and check the icon again.

• T11 Badging in the installed app (3 min)
  Demo page: /demo/badging/

Results

On iOS 18.6.2 (22G100) the OpenPWA icon showed a red badge “3” after the third call, in a screenshot taken at 08:54:41 UTC (Screenshot or recording, S; notebook N60). The app’s notification settings, captured 31 s earlier, had 允许通知 (Allow Notifications) on and 标记 (Badges) on (S; N60), and the Settings → 通知 list showed “OpenPWA 横幅、声音、标记” (S; N61). 'setAppBadge' in navigator and 'clearAppBadge' in navigator were false in a Safari tab (Instrumented read, A; N03) and true in the Home Screen apps (A; N13, N18).

Whether Clear badge removed the badge rests on the operator’s report alone and is not published as a result. The operator’s answer “no Badge” given later (N56) fits the state after clearing and was resolved by the screenshot (N60).

2026-10-20, iOS 18.6.2

After navigator.setAppBadge(3) in the demo app, which held notification permission, the screenshot shows a red 3 on its Home Screen icon. Clearing the badge was not recorded.

Date

2026-10-20

Device

iPhone 16 Pro

OS and build

iOS 18.6.2 (22G100), release

Context

Home Screen app

Result

As expected

Key values

• setAppBadge: 3
• iconBadge: 3

Confidence

S, Screenshot or recording

Tests

T11

Notebook entries

N60

Study

Read the study · Data package

Harness

Harness v1

No harness file: this run used the demo, which is not hash-locked.

Badging permission in WebKit and BCD

WebKit’s Safari 16.4 post adds the Badging API for Home Screen web apps on iOS and iPadOS and says that permission for it “is automatically granted when a user gives permission for notifications” (WebKit Features in Safari 16.4, webkit.org); the iOS 16.4 Web Push post lists badging with the same release (Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS, webkit.org). BCD records api.Navigator.setAppBadge on Safari for iOS from 16.4, with a note that badging is supported for web apps saved to the Home Screen (Navigator.json, github.com). The Badging API specification defines setAppBadge() and leaves how the badge is shown to the platform (Badging API, w3.org).

The measurement agrees with these sources. The count appeared on the icon of a Home Screen app that held notification permission, and the methods were absent in a tab. It confirms the published behaviour on 18.6.2 and is not a new finding.

Data

The evidence is in the study’s data package (CC BY 4.0): the icon in screenshots/2026-10-20_iphone16pro_ios18.6.2_T11_1_redacted.png (other apps blanked), the settings detail in screenshots/2026-10-20_iphone16pro_ios18.6.2_T7_4a.png and the list in screenshots/2026-10-20_iphone16pro_ios18.6.2_T7_4_redacted.png. The feature detection is in raw/2026-10-20-ios18.6.2-tab-demo.json (tab, N03), raw/2026-10-20-ios18.6.2-step09-app-demo.json (demo app, N13) and raw/2026-10-20-ios18.6.2-step12-app-lab.json (PWA Lab, N18). The machine-readable run is in /lab/results.json under the id app-badge-on-home-screen/2026-10-20-ios-18.6.2-22g100.

Related reference entries

The result backs the iOS field note of the Badging API entry and the Safari for iOS row of the Badging API compatibility data.

Reference entries

• Badging API
• Notification actions and badge options

Compatibility data

• Badging API, row Safari (iOS)

Limits

• One device, one build, one operator, one run day: an iPhone 16 Pro on iOS 18.6.2 (22G100).
• The badge is a screenshot result (S); no instrumented read exists for the badge step because the inspector listing was empty at the time.
• Clearing with clearAppBadge() rests on the operator’s report only and is not a published result.
• Only integer counts from the page were tested. setAppBadge() with no argument, setAppBadge(0), calls from the service worker, and calls without notification permission were not tested.
• iPadOS and other iOS builds were not tested. The same device is due to be rerun after its upgrade to iOS 27.

Device steps performed by an OpenPWA operator on an iPhone 16 Pro. AI agent sessions read page state over USB, kept the notebook and drafted this text; automated gates and an AI fact-check checked it. No person reviews each entry.