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How to use focus modes to put a heart, smiley face, fire symbol, and more in your iPhone’s status bar

There’s a new iPhone customization trend where users are using Apple’s new focus modes to put an icon of their choice in their status bar. One of the core features of focus is the ability to set a specific icon for identifying when you have a particular mode enabled. Focus modes can be complicated to set up, but if you just want to show a fun icon in your status bar, it’s fairly simple.

To get a custom icon set up in your status bar you’ll need to be running iOS 15 on your iPhone or iPadOS 15 on your iPad. There are more than 25 icons that you can choose from including fun ones like a smiley face, fire symbol, light bulb, and paw print.

Here’s how to get this configured on your own iPhone or iPad:

  • Launch Settings
  • Scroll down and tap Focus
  • Tap the + in the top right
  • Tap Custom
  • Select your icon of choice
  • Name your Focus
  • Choose who can send you notifications (you can select all of your contacts if you’d like to)
  • Enable all apps to show you notifications (this respects your custom notification settings)
  • Tap Done
  • Tap the switch to enable the Focus mode

Boom, you should see the icon you selected appear next to the clock in your iPhone’s status bar. It will go away temporarily if your iPhone needs to tell you an app is using your current location, so don’t worry if it disappears. If you want to, you can keep this single focus set up and simply change the icon in the Settings app on the fly.

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Avatar for Parker Ortolani Parker Ortolani

Parker Ortolani is a marketing strategist and product designer based in New York. In addition to contributing to 9to5mac, he also oversees product development and marketing for BuzzFeed. A longtime reader, Parker is excited to share his product concepts and thoughts with the 9to5mac audience.

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