How many times have the read receipts on your iMessage landed you in trouble? People know that you’ve seen their messages and yet chosen not to reply!
Well, while we can’t fix your social life, we can provide you digital solutions to better manage them.
So here’s an easy way to remove the read receipts from iMessages, so that the sender of a given text will never know if you’ve read those messages or not.
PS: In case you don’t know that read receipts are, and what the hell we’re talking about, have a look at the two screenshots below. The first one shows that my message (in the blue bubble) was delivered. Taken a minute later, the second screenshot shows that the message was read at 5:09.
How to hide read receipts?
It’s a very simple process, really. All you’ve got to do is this —
- Open up Settings app on your iPhone.
- Go to Messages.
- In the middle of the next page, you’ll find an option that says “Send Read Receipts”. (Fourth option from the top in iOS 10.3)
- It’s enabled by default. Just slide the toggle switch to the left to turn off the feature.
That’s it, you’re done!
Once you’ve disabled this feature, nobody will be able to tell if you’ve opened a particular message or not. But remember that the limitation applies to you as well. Meaning that you too won’t know if the other person has read your messages or not. So for example, in the earlier screenshot, I wouldn’t get any read — the chat would just show “delivered.”
There’s a trade-off, yes, but it’s a small price to pay for getting rid of people who constantly bore you with unnecessary texts. And when you don’t reply to their useless texts, and when they confront you, you can finally say, “Sorry, I didn’t get time to open them,” and not worry about being called a liar. Becuase really, there’s no way for them to know!