What's the state of play with badge counts on app launch icons?

I’ve been using the ionic badge plugin for while, but its behaviour on Android is difficult to predict… works in some scenarios, seems to clear on exit the app etc.

I suspect it is due to the “notification badges” that were introduced in Android 8, and this is alluded to in the ionic plugin documentation.

Is the only reliable solution to manipulate the badge count from within the app to implement a plugin based on the Android developer docs for modifying badges ?