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What Does the Red Dot on Your Apple Watch Mean?

Is the seemingly ever-present red dot on your Apple Watch annoying you? Here’s what it means, how to get rid of it, and how to make it useful.

an apple watch on a wrist Tucker Bowe

By Tucker Bowe

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Whether you’re a first time Apple Watch owner or somebody that upgrades to the newest model every year, there are always things you can learn. Chief among them is learning what the various icons and symbols that appear on it actually mean.

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Apple has developed a number of icons and symbols that are designed to alert you to something without having you unlock or touch your Apple Watch. And the good news is no matter which Apple Watch model you have — from the older Series 3 to the brand new Series 8 or Ultra — all of these icons are the same.

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What does the Red Dot mean?

an apple watch on a wrist
Tucker Bowe

When you see the red dot notification icon, it simply means that you have received a notification and you haven’t read it yet. This notification could be a wide variety of things, everything from a text, a missed phone call, or notification from basically any app.

If you see the red dot notification icon, you can check what it is by simply swiping down from the top of the Apple Watch. When you then swipe away from this notification screen and back to your default watch face it’ll mark those notifications as seen and the red dot will disappear.

How to customize your notifications

Since the red dot notification icon appears on your Apple Watch every time you get a notification, you might get fatigued with it given all notifications you get. And not every notification really matters, if we’re being honest. Fortunately, you can customize the notification settings so that the red dot only appears for notifications from specific apps.

  1. Open the Watch app on your iPhone.
  2. Select the My Watch tab (at bottom of screen).
  3. Select Notifications.

From this screen, you can toggle off all notifications (so the red dot never appears), or if you scroll down you can go into each individual app (both Apple’s and third-party apps) and individually choose whether you want notifications to appear from those apps. If you don’t, simply select that app and then turn “Notifications Off.”

There are a lot more icons and symbols that appear on your Apple Watch — but the red dot is the most common. If you’re interested in learning what all the other icons and systems mean, read Apple’s full documentation here.