iMessage read receipts can be useful for time-sensitive conversations, but they can also become a pain for people who don’t want to know when someone has read their text.

Thankfully, it’s easy to turn off read receipts for the iPhone and disable them entirely. To do this, open the Messages app and scroll down to Settings. Tap the Send Read Receipts toggle and turn it off.

How to Turn Off Read Receipts

If you don’t want others to know that you’ve read their messages, it’s easy to turn off the feature on an iPhone. This wikiHow article will walk you through how to do so in three quick steps.

In some cases, it’s helpful to know when someone has read your message — particularly if you’re trying to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. In these situations, read receipts can help you to know whether or not your sender has viewed your message.

On iPhones, this feature is enabled by default (Settings -> Messages). However, you can also override the global setting on a per-contact basis.

To enable or disable read receipts for an individual contact, tap on their avatar in your iMessage conversation or go to their entry in the Contacts app. Then, scroll down to the read receipt section and toggle it on or off as needed.

This will apply to all conversations you’ve had with that person. If you’re not sure which contact has this setting turned on, try looking at your history. If there’s an unanswered iMessage that they sent you that has two checkmarks under it, it means that they’ve turned this feature off.

It’s hard to tell if a contact has turned off read receipts on their end, though. You’ll have to see if the “Delivered” text under the iMessage that they’ve sent you changes from green to “Read.”

If this doesn’t happen, it means they’ve disabled the feature in their chat settings. You’ll also see a little time stamp next to the message.

For older Android phones, read receipts aren’t available. Instead, the “Sent” and “Delivered” statuses will show up as a green or yellow circle, depending on their mode.

Some people hate reading read receipts because it makes them feel like they’re wasting other people’s time, and it’s an invasion of privacy. While they don’t like seeing this, they might not have any other way to tell when people read their messages. It’s up to them to decide how much they value their privacy.

The Messages App

If you don’t want other people to know when you read their messages on the iPhone, you can turn off read receipts. iMessage offers this feature by default, and it’s easy to disable for specific contacts or everyone on your phone.

The Messages app lets you send and receive text, picture, audio, video, location, and other types of content between users on a variety of devices. Messages can be sent over Wi-Fi or cellular data to other iOS, Android, and Apple Watch users.

Messages also includes several features to make it easier for you to manage your texts and conversations. For example, the app can now sort personal texts from business ones and can even delete one-time passwords that you’ve sent over text.

When you’re chatting with someone, you can also save their birthdays and reminders in the Messages app so you can quickly open them when you need them. This way, you won’t have to switch apps each time to remember a birthday or set an appointment.

You can also use iMessage to share links to YouTube videos with other iOS or macOS users without having to leave the Messages app. This is especially helpful if you haven’t yet figured out how to copy and paste from your phone into a different app, or even if you want to share a link with someone who hasn’t an iPhone.

If you’re an admin, this is a global setting and will affect all of your contacts and every single iMessage chat. However, you can disable it on a person-by-person basis for some people, as shown in Figure B.

To turn read receipts off on the Messages app, open a conversation with someone and tap their profile icon at the top of the screen. Then scroll down to the Send Read Receipts option and toggle it off.

While you’re at it, don’t forget to disable the global setting of Send Read Receipts, too. That way, if you ever decide to turn it back on, you won’t accidentally turn on all of your conversations. That could cause some confusion, and you may need to turn it off again later if you don’t want to be notified whenever you’ve read someone’s messages.

iMessage

If you’re not a fan of reading text messages from others, or you simply don’t want to be distracted by them, you can turn off read receipts on your iPhone. It’s an easy task that even beginners can do, and it will keep other people from knowing when you haven’t responded to their messages in a while.

Read receipts are a feature that Apple offers on the iMessage app on an iPhone or Mac. They show the time of the last message you received, as well as whether or not it’s been delivered. While they’re useful for times when you need to make sure you’re responding to a specific time-sensitive message, they can be distracting and annoying to others.

You can either disable read receipts globally, which will affect all your contacts and group chats, or you can opt to disable them for a single contact. This is great if you have a friend who is always sending you messages and it’s just not a good idea for them to know when you’ve read their messages.

To turn off read receipts for a contact, open the Messages app on your iPhone and select a conversation with that person. You’ll see a set of options in the second set of menus below your contact’s name. Slide Send Read Receipts to off.

Once you’ve done that, a green message will appear next to their name in the contact list, and they’ll no longer be able to see when you’ve read their messages. You can also toggle off the option to share a “seen” status for better privacy.

In addition to being a nuisance, read receipts can be a safety issue. If someone knows when you’ve read their messages, they might start hounding you for a response if they think you’re hiding something.

It can also be a problem if you’re using the iMessage app on an iPhone and someone else has read your messages and then left them “on read.” When that happens, you might have to check your phone over and over again.

You can also turn off read receipts in iMessage on your iPhone or Mac. Just go to Settings and scroll down to the Send Read Receipts section. Click on the toggle to off.

Settings

If you’re concerned about your privacy when reading messages on your iPhone, you can turn off read receipts on a person-by-person basis. iOS 10 and later let you do this with a simple tap in the Messages app.

Messages is Apple’s own free, end-to-end encrypted instant messaging service that works on iPhones, iPads and Macs. The service has a variety of security features, such as the ability to delete messages after they’re sent and a higher limit on file sizes.

This is a great feature for anyone who wants to keep their personal communications private. However, it can be annoying to see a “Read” status update appear when you open a message from someone you’ve never spoken to before.

Even if you don’t mind it, it can be a nuisance when you’re reading time-sensitive messages on an iPhone. You can use the settings to turn off read receipts for a specific contact, but it’s also possible to disable the global feature on a per-person basis.

To turn off read receipts on a specific contact, you need to select that person’s conversation in the Messages app and tap their profile icon at the top of the screen. Once you have done this, you can then slide the Send Read Receipts button to off position, which will stop your iPhone from sending a read receipt to them.

You can also toggle read receipts on or off for all contacts in your iMessages list by visiting iMessage > Preferences. This option applies to everyone in your contact list, so it’s important that you don’t do this if you’re only concerned about a particular contact.

Finally, you can also toggle read receipts on or off in your Settings by visiting iMessage and selecting the Send Read Receipts setting. This only applies to iMessages, so it won’t affect conversations with people who use SMS (short message service) messaging on other devices.

If you’re not sure whether your iPhone is set up for iMessages or SMS messages, check the green text messages in your contact list. If the messages are green, they’re iMessages.