Action Center was one of the big changes included in Windows 10 since its release. Acting as a hub for the toast notifications and alerts related to the UWP apps installed on your PC and other system apps, Action Center provides you a quick overview of what’s going on in the world of your apps and programs. If your Windows 10 Action Center Taskbar icon is not showing App icons, then this post shows how you can show or hide app icons in the Action Center icon.
Show or Hide app icons in Action Center
By default, app icons are shown on the taskbar, overlapping the Action Center icon for the fraction of a second, accompanied by the total number of new notifications stacked up in Action Center ready for you to dismiss. The feature, in general, has proved to be quite useful where you can know beforehand which app has sprung up notifications, without even peeking into the Action center domain. I personally enjoy this feature a lot as I have my Windows Phone connected to the PC and it goes live whenever any notification arrives on my phone. The Cortana icon shows up on my PC telling me that I need to attend to my phone to view the notification.
However, we have a couple of ways using which you can hide the app icons if that’s what you prefer. Follow the below methods in order to do so:
1] Using Action Center context menu
Quite the simplest one! Just right-click the Action Center icon to pop up its context menu. Click/Tap “Don’t show app icons” in order to hide the icons as and when notifications come in. While for turning them back on, you need to click “Show app icons” button. According to your settings, the same will be reflected whenever a new notification dives in.
2] Using Registry Editor
1. Hit Windows Key + R on your keyboard to open Run prompt, enter regedit and hit enter to open Registry Editor. Make sure you have created a system restore point before you go on to play with registry entries.
2. On the left pane of Registry Editor, navigate to the below path:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Notifications\Settings
3. Right-Click Settings key and select New -> DWORD (32 bit) Value. Name the DWORD as NOC_GLOBAL_SETTING_GLEAM_ENABLED.
4. Double click and open the newly created DWORD and set its value as 0.
5. Click OK and close the registry editor. Now, restart the Windows Explorer process from Task Manager or alternatively, you can log out and log back in to make the changes effective.
6. Once back on with the changes, you’ll see that the app icons are turned off and it is also synced up the Action center context menu as well.
7. In order to turn on the app icons again, you just need to delete the DWORD created in step 3. Make sure to restart the Windows Explorer process to make the changes effective.
How do you customize the icons in the Action Center?
To customize the icons in the Action Center, you have two options on the Windows 10 PC. First, you can use the context menu option called Show app icons. Secondly, you can use the Registry Editor to show or hide the app icons in the Action Center. For that, navigate to this path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Notifications\ Settings and create a REG_DWORD value named NOC_GLOBAL_SETTING_GLEAM_ENABLED.
How do I hide the Action Center icon in Windows 10?
To hide the Action Center icons in Windows 10, you can follow the aforementioned guides. First, you can right-click on the Action Center and choose the Don’t show app icons option. Second, you can use the Registry Editor to get the same thing done. For that, you need to create a REG_DWORD value named NOC_GLOBAL_SETTING_GLEAM_ENABLED and set the Value data as 0.
That’d be all, folks! Hope this helps you.
