There will be times when a message is time-sensitive and you need to read it right away. But you may not want to respond right away.
Fortunately, you can prevent your contacts from knowing when you’ve read their text messages and iMessages. Follow these simple steps to turn read off on iphone.
- Go to Settings
There are a lot of ways to customize your iPhone, from its home screen and wallpaper to its notification sounds and vibration settings. But one important setting that’s easy to overlook is your privacy settings. These allow you to control how private your device is and what information apps are able to access.
When you read a message on your iPhone, the sender can see that you have seen it too — thanks to a feature called “read receipts.” While this can be useful for time-sensitive conversations or those who don’t want to risk missing an urgent response, not everyone wants this feature turned on all the time.
To turn off read receipts, open the Settings app and select Messages. Scroll down and turn off the toggle next to Send Read Receipts. Then, anyone who sends you a message will not know when you have read their message.
If you’re not comfortable turning off read receipts entirely, it’s also possible to turn them off on a per-contact basis. To do this, open the Messages app and choose a conversation with the contact you’d like to change the setting for. Then, tap the i button in the upper right corner of the conversation and select “Edit Read Receipts.”
You can also control how much information Apple collects from your iPhone by changing its location services settings. This is important because it allows you to limit ad tracking and prevent Apple from using your data for any purposes other than improving the overall experience. To do this, open the Settings app and select Privacy – Location Services. From there, you can adjust various location services, including Siri Suggestions and Apple Advertising.
- Scroll down to Messages
The Messages app on your iPhone lets you see when people read text messages that you send them. You can turn this feature on globally in Settings > Messages or on a person-by-person basis by opening the conversation in Messages and tapping the i button. If you see that the “Send Read Receipts” option is grayed out, your contact has turned off this setting.
This works with iMessages (instant messages) sent over Wi-Fi or your data connection, not SMS (short message service) texts that are typically sent using your cell carrier’s network and appear in green text bubbles. If you want to disable read receipts for iMessages, open the conversation with the contact in Messages and tap their profile icon above the thread. This opens their iMessage menu and allows you to toggle the Send Read Receipts switch to the off position.
You can also turn off read receipts for individual contacts on a per-message basis on macOS Sierra by starting the conversation in Messages and tapping the contact’s name in the upper right corner of the interface. Then, click the info button in the top right corner of the chat and deselect the Send Read Receipts box.
This trick can be helpful if you need to look back at old messages in a long conversation. It’s faster and more reliable than trying to use the search function, which sometimes gets messed up when the phone is in landscape mode, as many of us do now with the iPhone X and above. This method also works in other Apple apps, such as Mail and Safari. Just be careful to keep your screen locked so nobody knows you’re reading.
- Tap Messages
Read receipts are a handy feature that can let senders know when you’ve seen their messages, but they can also be a nuisance. Fortunately, it’s easy to turn them off on an iPhone, whether you have the latest iPhone 13 or one of its predecessors. In just three steps, you can disable the option to hide when a contact has read your text messages.
The first step is to open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. Once there, scroll down and tap Messages. From here, you can disable the switch next to Send Read Receipts to turn them off. You can also do this on a per-message basis, allowing or disallowing read receipts for specific conversations.
When you’re done, you can open the Messages app and look for blue text bubbles instead of green ones. This means you’ve turned off read receipts for the iMessage conversations on your phone, but it won’t apply to messages sent through Short Message Service (SMS) that use your carrier’s regular network connections and cost you money.
Changing the iMessage setting in Messages will affect all of your existing conversations. If you want to enable read receipts again, simply scroll back up to the top of the page and flip the toggle switch to on.
You can also disable the feature on a per-contact basis in Messages, either by tapping the i button next to the person’s avatar in the iMessage conversation or in their entry in your contacts list. You can do this on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The option isn’t available for group texts. Also, this method will only work if the other person has an Apple device and is using iMessages.
- Scroll down to Send Read Receipts
Whether you want to give your friends and family members peace of mind or just take a breather from the constant pinging of text messages, turning off read receipts is a quick, easy way to do so. Just be aware that the change will affect all conversations and not just those with specific individuals.
To turn off the feature, simply head to your settings and scroll down to Send Read Receipts. From there, just switch the toggle to the off position. That’s all there is to it. You will no longer see a green toggle indicating that you have read receipts enabled and your contacts won’t be able to see yours either.
You can also opt to keep the toggle on but disable them for individual conversations. To do so, open a conversation with the person you would like to change the read receipts for and tap the i in the upper right corner. This will allow you to turn off the read receipts for that conversation only.
This may come in handy when, for example, you receive a message from your husband just before an important meeting that you have to attend. If you aren’t able to respond immediately, you can just tell him that you saw his message and will get back to him later.
The downside of this is that your husband will now be unable to see when you have read his message, but you can also opt to turn it on again for that particular conversation or for all conversations with him in the future. Just remember that you will be allowing your friends and family members to see when you have read their messages, regardless of which option you choose to go with.
- Tap Off
Master Your iPhone in One Minute a Day
iMessage read receipts are a helpful feature to have enabled, but it may not be desirable for all conversations. The good news is that it’s easy to disable this feature for individual threads. To do so, head to an individual thread and scroll down to Send Read Receipts. Toggle the switch here to turn it off. Doing so will prevent the person who sent you that thread from knowing when you’ve read it.
This tip works on the iPhone 13 and later running the iOS 16 operating system. It also applies to most other recent models of the device, including the iPhone X and iPhone XS.
If you’ve ever received a text message on your iPhone that shows “Read” next to the sender’s name, it means that they have turned on the feature of reading receipts for their conversations with you. Some people don’t mind this and even like it, but others want to keep their message-reading activities private. Thankfully, you can easily disable read receipts for specific messages in iMessage or on your iPhone’s SMS app.
Apple’s iPhone comes with a host of accessibility features designed to make it easier for people with vision or hearing impairments to use the device. The Back Tap feature is one of these, and it turns the Apple logo on the back of the iPhone into a shortcut that can trigger any number of different functions. It’s not available by default, but you can enable it through the Settings app under Accessibility. To learn how to set up Back Tap, watch this video:
