How to Remove Badges from Sony Xperia Phone

I get nagged enough in real life: I don’t need my phone to add to the problem. I, therefore, turn off ALL notifications except for those that have to do with actual phone calls (which are rare) or SMS messages. Apps should go silently about their business, in my opinion. That especially includes email apps, which should be there for when I *want to* check, not ping and ding me every time someone sends me something.

I feel the same way about “badges”, the little numbers that appear beside app icons on your phone’s screens to tell you how many new notifications you have received, or how many are unread. I don’t need that kind of stress in my life, so I prefer to remove all badges.

HOWEVER…

While you can remove badges on a Samsung phone by disabling the “badgeprovider” app, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent app on my Xperia XZ phone. From what I can tell (and feel free to correct me in the comments), the only way to solve this problem on an Xperia phone is to replace the default launcher with a third party app such as Nova or Apex. You can do this by going into the Play Store and searching for “Nova Launcher” or “Apex Launcher” and installing one or both of them. After you install the launcher of your choice, click on your “HOME” button (the one on the bottom of your phone, shaped like a house) and you should be asked which launcher you want to use in the future. Chose the one you installed. Note that this will undo any customizations that you have made to your screens, so you will have to sort them out again from the start. (Of course, you will only have to do this once and then the new app will remember your preferences.)

I am using Nova, and from what I can tell, badges are disabled by default. I lost all of the customizations that I had made in the default launcher, but as I prefer a very minimalist interface, this did not take very long.