Can apps running in background after closing all their windows show a small icon etc in right top bar?
If there is such a setting where is it? I could not find in Settings, Gnome Ext Settings, or in Gnome Tweak Tool.
I think the idea is that the notifications only appear when the window is open. If you are not focused on it you can move it to another workspace. But if you close it, it’s because you don’t want to be bothered by it anymore. Still there are apps that can run in the background like geary, calendar or ToDo. Also it would be interesting to have a notification on the app to see the amount of messages and so on… So I understand that a do not disturb mode is in the works… But I’m not sure.
About status icons: Here is the reason why gnome doesn’t support it. You can add this functionality with this extension, thought.
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I have read through and it makes sense. Now I think same.
Status icons cause clutter, and they are mostly unnecessary.
But we still need to know if an app is running when we look at the screen or dock even all of its windows are closed.
Even a dock dot indicator shown when some app is running would be suffice. Then we could call it running indicator on the dock. Properties of the running indicator, e.g. shape, size, opacity, place, might be different than a dot. But simplicity would be better. I would like only a dot to indicate if the app is running or not regardless off being in background or foreground.
Currently, when all the windows of an app are closed the dock dot indicator does not show. That makes the dock dot indicator only an indication of if any windows of an app is open. But that does not currently seem as a very good use case for that indicator.
If it indicated whether an app is running at all (even backgrounded) or not that would be better and we would not need another indicator for that purpose.
There can be a pale dock dot indicator which means app is running and all windows of the app is closed/hidden, or a pale app icon on the dock could mean that too since a small dot might be difficult to notice alone. Also we could have that indicators on other places too, we do not need and have much places actually, we just have the Overview.
But what do I know about Gnome and window managers anyways 
. But that was a very serious user feedback.
The app should support notifications:
Notifications and the notification list
You can also use a custom command:
notify-send test
Hello @vgaetera. Sorry I did not quite get your point.