Read receipts are a handy feature on iPhone that lets the sender know you’ve viewed their message. But they can also be a nuisance, especially when you don’t want to respond immediately.

Fortunately, you can turn them off on your iPhone if you don’t want to let anyone know when you’ve viewed a message. Here’s how to do it.

Turn Off Read Receipts for All Conversations

Read receipts are an important feature for iMessage, but you may not want to send them out every time you receive a message. They also can be a nuisance if you have sensitive information to communicate with someone, and you don’t want them to know when you read their message.

Fortunately, iOS makes it easy to turn off read on your iPhone. You can do this for all conversations, individual contacts, or a specific group of people.

To turn off read for all your conversations, head to Settings and tap Messages. From there, scroll down to Send Read Receipts and toggle it on or off, depending on your preferences.

You can also turn off read receipts for individual contacts on your iPhone. To do this, select an iMessage conversation and tap the profile portrait of the person you’re trying to hide the read receipt from.

If you’re not sure if you can disable the feature for an individual contact, open a thread with that person and check if they’re still receiving read receipts. You can also check their entry in the Contacts app.

While these workarounds aren’t foolproof, they can buy you a little bit of time before the next message comes in. In the meantime, you’ll need to find another way to communicate with them.

In most cases, the person will not realize that they have turned off their read receipts until you send them a message again. That’s because the message will still show ‘Delivered’ underneath it, even when you turn them off.

Turn Off Read Receipts for Individual Conversations

While read receipts can be useful in certain situations, they can also cause a lot of distraction for people. They can make it difficult to focus on a conversation because they show when the sender read their message and how long they took to read it.

Fortunately, there is a way to turn off read on your iphone for individual conversations on a case by case basis. This feature is available in both iOS and macOS, but it can be a bit tricky to get right.

First, you need to find the person you want to disable read for on your phone. The best place to start is their profile portrait on the app. If you can’t find them, search their name or contact information in your contacts list.

Once you’ve found them, tap on their avatar and toggle “Send Read Receipts” off for this specific conversation. Note that this option is only available in iMessage-enabled conversations. Regular SMS and group messages do not support read receipts at all.

You can also go to a contact’s entry in the Contacts app and toggle “Send Read Receipts” on or off for their conversations as well. However, this is more complicated than it looks because you have to scroll through the conversations in order to find the one you want to disable for a contact.

To do this, open the Contacts app on your iPhone or iPad and then select a contact to view their information. You can then tap on the avatar in the top right corner of the screen.

Finally, you can toggle “Send Read Receipts” back on or off for this specific conversation if you want. You can also go to your contacts list and change it for other people, if you have multiple people in your list that you wish to enable or disable read receipts for on an individual basis.

Turn Off Read Receipts for Text Messages

Read receipts are a useful feature for text message senders, but they can also be a bit annoying to other people. If you’re not a fan of the idea of someone knowing when you’ve read their messages, it can be easy to turn off the feature on your iPhone.

There are a couple of ways to do this, depending on which app you’re using. For example, the Messages app on iOS and iPadOS lets you disable read receipts on a global basis. However, if you want to turn off read receipts on a person-by-person basis, you have to do so in a different way.

To turn off read receipts on your phone, open the Messages app and select the conversation you want to change the setting for. Then, tap the person’s avatar at the top of the screen.

Now, you’ll see a button labeled “Send read receipts.” This is where you can enable or disable the read receipts for that contact. You can switch it off or on, and it will be the default setting for all future conversations between you and that person.

You can also turn off read receipts on a conversation-by-conversation basis by heading to an individual thread and tapping the person’s avatar. Once you’ve done that, scroll down and tap the “Send Read Receipts” button.

This toggle will show up green if the feature is enabled, and it will switch to grey if it’s disabled. If you’d like to have it back on again, simply toggle it back to green.

Turn Off Read Receipts for iMessage

Read receipts are a handy feature that lets you know when someone has looked at your text message. But they can also become a nuisance for some people. If you’re one of those people who hates having to see when your friends or loved ones have read their messages, it’s possible to turn off the feature for everyone in your iMessage contact list.

To disable the global setting for all your contacts, open the Settings app on your iPhone and choose Messages. From there, scroll down and tap the toggle for Send Read Receipts.

You can also turn off read receipts for individual conversations on your iPhone. To do this, select a conversation in Messages and tap the avatar of the person you want to disable the feature for. Swipe down on the avatar and then scroll down to the Send Read Receipts option.

The only downside to disabling read receipts is that they’ll no longer appear in the recipient’s profile photo. However, this will not affect the time the message was sent, so you can still tell when a person has read it without knowing whether or not they’ve turned it off.

Thankfully, you can always turn them back on again later if you feel like you’re being too much of a pain to the other person in the situation. And, while it’s easy to turn off the global setting, it can be a bit more difficult to do so on a per-conversation basis.