Text Message Badge Won't Go Away on Mac

None of these worked for me actually, and I ended up reaching out to Apple Support. Their next suggestion worked for me finally, which was:

Ask Siri to read you your unread messages

I agree, this is kinda annoying, but at least now we have a workaround. I used the "solution" to have Siri read to me all 15 of my "unread" text messages (they were already read on my other devices), and it worked, so obviously the badge does go away on the iMessage App icon in the Dock once Sonoma knows all messages have been read, so there must be only a small bit of code called for to remove this bug. Thanks, @AirForceDelta46 . Meanwhile, if I keep up on this status, it takes only a few seconds to clear the badge, and it’s only called for about once each two weeks or longer, so no biggie, right?

How about it, Apple? Maybe it's harder than we users think it is, perhaps due to the Mac being offline when a message is read on another device, and there is no straightforward way to keep that "mark that message read" task in some queue (in iCloud?) until the Mac goes online again (and in fact, the more I think about this, the harder to achieve this seems).

I wish there were some way to know more about how some behaviors in the Apple ecosystem are being left the way they are, and how users can best deal with them (maybe even take advantage of them). Some “ecosystems” (typically on Linux) have a “known issues” WWW page (or even better, a Wiki) that provides this awareness and collects additional info, perhaps even solution ideas for the developers.

I had the same issue (using iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia). I had deleted a spam text on my phone and my Mac showed a notification badge for which there was no message left to read. Tried the Siri solution and it just said "you have no unread messages."

I then tried selecting all the messages on the left panel of my Messages app on my Mac, all of which had been read, right-clicking and selecting "Mark as Unread," then right-clicking again and selecting "Mark as Read," at which point the notification badge disappeared.

If the Siri solution doesn't work for you, give this a try.

Here is a way of using this Siri solution without having to listen to each unread message.

Siri actually decrements the message count right at the beginning of responding to your request to read unread messages. You can click away from Siri—effectively cancelling the request—so you don't have to listen to the message being read through. Simply keep repeating this process of requesting and canceling until your unread message count is zero.

In addition to having Siri listen constantly in my office, I simply don't want to clutter the interface on my desktop Mac any further with features that don't add utility. I have no need to talk to my computer that I'm aware of, and in my experience, I have better ways to quickly access information I need than by formulating an oral request in a way that Siri would correctly interpret.

More to the point: it is not rational to have to apply a workaround like this -- having the Siri function read messages (that I don't want to hear) in order to get around a glitch in the way the Apple ecosystem tracks messages and when they are read. For now, I just live with the incorrect red number showing unread messages until I log out, which fixes the issue... I don't want another loop of complexity in my online life.

Sending the message to myself from my Mac and then reading it on my iPhone worked! The other solutions (using Terminal command, asking Siri to read unread messages etc.) have worked for me in the past but didn't this time.

After a long search and reading and trying thoughtful but unproductive posts from this forum and others, I kept scrolling and came across your post. I asked Siri to read unread messages on all of my apple devices including watch, phone, iPad, MacBook. Finally the badges have disappeared and they appear to now be synced. Thank you.

This worked for me! Simply went to the top right corner and clicked on Siri and said "Read all unread messages" she then read messages from like a year ago and asks if I want to reply. I said "No" three times and all the notifications were gone.

YES! It worked on my macbook. I finally got rid of the message icon badge! Thank you for the solution!

I would think that with all of the many upgrades we need to install that this bug would be addressed. The temporary fix only lasts a few weeks, then it pops up again.

Command click to select all, or a large group, of messages. Right click and "Mark as Unread." Then right click again and "Mark as Read." This worked for me.

This does work... though it had to be a long (unwanted, long-since-deleted) political campaign text that took minutes to read <groan>. And I had to turn on Siri on my Mac first (maybe Apple does this as a sneaky way to get Siri onto our Macs as well as phones?)

@PQuincy, please enlighten me: Why would anyone want to avoid/prevent Siri working on their Mac? And if you don't want Siri to listen for "(Hey, ) Siri", why don't you just turn it off in System Settings >> Siri and Spotlight? I'm not deriding you; I just really want to learn.

@PQuincy, I agree that it's kinda sad that we live in such a complicated world that some desired functions are really hard to implement, but OTOH we have wonderful tools that work really well overall. Here's the best I can do to make the situation a little better for you:

In macOS Sonoma 14.2.1, and I believe these options have not changed in later versions, this is what I see:

Apple menu >> System Settings … >> Siri & Spotlight >> Listen for "Siri" or “Hey Siri" or Off.

Even if I choose “Off”, the Siri keyboard shortcut that I have chosen still works.

Doesn't this make it really easy to use the workaround I described, while also satisfying all of your requirements and/or meeting all of your goals?

Thank you AirForceDelta46! Asking Siri to read messages worked for me as well. Turn out someone had a tapback to a message that I had seen on another device and was showing read when I filtered for unread messages, but still triggered the badge. A working "clear notifications from this device" for apps would help if notification syncing can't be fixed, Apple.