Disable AppCenter dock reminder

Question

From time to time, AppCenter will find an update and hang out in my dock with a red, circular "badge" overlay and a number.

• How can I deactivate this persistent dock notification?
• Separately, how do I stop AppCenter from automatically checking on updates?

Answer 1

The AppCenter periodically shows updates because it runs in the background on startup. To disable its notifications, set it to not run on startup:

1. mkdir ~/.config/autostart/

2. cp /etc/xdg/autostart/io.elementary.appcenter-daemon.desktop ~/.config/autostart/

   This copies the AppCenter startup directions from the general autostart folder to your personal folder. (The startup process prioritizes directions given in the latter.) Then modify the new file to not load on startup:

3. echo "X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=false" | tee -a ~/.config/autostart/io.elementary.appcenter-daemon.desktop

4. reboot

---

If you would like to keep AppCenter running but just remove the badge, there is currently no configuration setting for this. (Badge counts are hardcoded in their other instances.) If you'd like to build your own version without notifications, start with modifying /src/Core/Client.vala and /src/Widgets/AppCellRenderer.vala in the source code.

Answer 2

To the first question, you can open a terminal and type:

killall appcenter

Now the reminder dessapears from Planck.

To the second question, you can try to show all the hidden startup applications. Open a terminal and type:

sudo sed -i 's/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g' /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop

Then launch the Gnome session properties from terminal:

gnome-session-properties

Look for the appcenter launcher and uncheck it. It called:

appcenter -s

Source of some parts of this answer by @cipricus:

How to access and edit Startup applications in Elementary OS Freya beta 2?

Answer 3

killall io.elementary.appcenter worked for me to kill the process