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What does the phone icon mean on Discord?

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  • 2 min read

Discord is one of the most popular VoIP programs in the world. While it was originally meant as a comms app for gamers, it has since expanded to fulfil more use cases and work on more devices. 

In this article, we’re taking a look at what the phone icon means on Discord and everything else you need to know. 

Also read: Discord unable to load about me and profile banner badges: 6 Fixes


Discord’s phone icon explained

Discord uses multiple icon types to show a person’s online status. Since the service is accessible from either a web browser, console, PC or smartphone app, different icons are used to indicate whether the user is online from a PC/console or mobile device. 

As you can likely guess, the phone icon on Discord indicates that a user is online from a mobile device. The icon was introduced in January 2019 and uses the Gateway ‘IDENTIFY’ package which includes the following fields:

  • $os
  • $device
  • $browser

The $browser field determines whether or not a user is logged in through the browser or Discord’s PC app and controls the online symbol. If the field detects the user is using Discord from their phone, it changes the online icon to a phone icon instead of the regular green dot. 

This, however, doesn’t extend to other Discord status icons. The idle orange and do not disturb red icons don’t have platform-specific equivalents and are shown exactly the same regardless of the end user’s platform. By extension, custom status icons are also the same across platforms as they’re shared and don’t need platform-specific icons to be shown.

Also read: What is Automatic Gain Control in Discord?

Yadullah Abidi

Yadullah Abidi

Yadullah is a Computer Science graduate who writes/edits/shoots/codes all things cybersecurity, gaming, and tech hardware. When he's not, he streams himself racing virtual cars. He's been writing and reporting on tech and cybersecurity with websites like Candid.Technology and MakeUseOf since 2018. You can contact him here: yadullahabidi@pm.me.

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