how to turn off read receipts iphone

To turn off read receipts on iPhone, you need to disable the Send Read Receipts option in the Messages settings; you can do this for everyone or for specific conversations.

Turn off for all messages

This stops all iMessage contacts from seeing when you read their texts and only shows them “Delivered.” You can change this anytime if you decide you want read receipts back.

Steps:

1. Open Settings on your iPhone.

2. Scroll down and tap Messages.

3. Find Send Read Receipts.
4. Toggle it off (the switch should turn grey, not green).

Once this is off, people will no longer see “Read” with a time under the messages you open.

Turn off for one person

If you only want to hide read receipts from certain contacts, you can change it per conversation on most modern iOS versions. This is useful if you want close contacts to see when you read messages but not everyone else.

Steps:

1. Open the Messages app.

2. Open the conversation with the person you want to change this for.

3. Tap their name or profile icon at the top of the screen.

4. Scroll and turn Send Read Receipts off for that contact.

You can repeat this for any other conversation where you want custom read receipt behavior.

Quick notes and current context

• This applies to iMessage (blue bubbles); SMS/MMS (green bubbles) do not use Apple’s read receipts.

• On recent iOS versions, the wording and toggle style remain similar, so the same basic path (Settings → Messages → Send Read Receipts) still works in 2025–2026 tutorials.

• If you use RCS or other chat apps (like Instagram or WhatsApp), those have their own read-receipt settings separate from iPhone Messages.

TL;DR: Go to Settings → Messages → Send Read Receipts → Off , and optionally adjust the toggle inside individual message threads for per-person control.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.