The Easiest Way to Get Rid of “ghost” Message Notifications on Your IPhone

If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t need hundreds (or thousands) of unread messages on your iPhone, there are some easy ways to mark them all as read. But what if you have “ghost” unread messages like Reddit user RamyKhashroom did ? They deleted all the messages, updated their iPhone – just about everything you could expect – and yet they were left with five unread messages that couldn’t be seen. What gives?

This is one of those rare cases where Siri comes to the rescue, as user guriel pointed out in the same thread: When you find yourself dealing with multiple unread messages, you can ask Siri to read them for you with a voice command like: ” Hey Siri, read my messages.” The voice assistant will start reading all unread texts and remove the remaining notification icons, even if the messages don’t actually exist.

While this tip is good for people who encounter an iOS bug that sometimes won’t wipe the notification icon, you can also use it to your advantage when you have a few unread messages hidden deep in the bowels of the Messages app. Alternatively, you can open the Messages app, go to the list of all texts, and tap on the three dots icon at the top. Click Select Posts , and then click Read All at the bottom left corner of the screen. Of course, if you’re still left with “unread” messages due to an iOS bug, invoke Siri as a backup.

Better yet, you can get rid of the notification icon altogether . If you’re ready to give up these icons on your iPhone, go to Settings > Notifications and select the app you’re looking for. Then turn off Icons to hide the notification icon in this app. Better yet, repeat this for all apps that have a large number of unread notifications. You may find that your relationship with your phone has improved if you choose to manually check for updates to your apps.