AppIndicator support in GNOME 3

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Hello
I recently shifted from Cinnamon to GNOME 3. So far so good. But I found that my app which has an icon in Panel, does not do so. I added KStatusIcon extension from Extensions website but it renders my icon invisible (if I drag cursor over it, I can see my app name pop up, but icon is not there). I think this is due to the issue that my app is powered by Gtk and not my Qt.

So my question is, why is an AppIndicator not supported? It is really useful, like a messenger could show how many unread messages are there and so. GtkStatusIcon also seems to be good but it is depreciated and no alternative is mentioned in the Docs.
Got any idea? :slight_smile:

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There are a couple of extensions you can use:

As to why GNOME deprecated status icons, you can read this blog post from one of the members of the GNOME design team. The AppIndicators used in Unity were never really supported in GNOME for a variety of reasons.

From a technological standpoint:

  • status icons are X11-only, because the tray icons specification was written when only X11 existed; there is no equivalent specification for Wayland
  • the KStatusNotifier specification, which is used by libappindicator, is not a great specification; it also uses a serialization/deserialization protocol for menus that can only be described as an horrific kludge
  • additionally, libappindicator is unmaintained

You can read more about the state of status notification icons on this blog post.

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