For quite some time, iMessages has featured the ability to show read receipts, allowing you to indicate to other if and when you read their messages. The feature is good for some cases, but others not as much.
This is a handy feature in some cases, like when you’re waiting for a response to something important. It can also be one of the worst features if you have a chat-happy friend or someone who expects instant texts back no matter how busy you are.
Previous to iOS 10, you had to be all in or all out, but now you can set read receipts on an individual basis.
Here’s how you can easily set this up on your iPhone or iPad running iOS 10 :
For starters, head into Messages, and make sure you have read receipts on in general. To do this head into Settings -> Messages-> Show Read Receipts
Next, head into a messaging thread with someone. On the upper right you’ll see a little ‘i’. Click on it.
Now, Scroll down until you see ‘Show Read Receipts’. Select or deselect it.
Read Receipts Not Showing Up?
It’s easy to forget that you only get ‘read receipts’ if the other person using iMessage and has that option turned on in their device. Sometimes we try to go through all sorts of fixes while overlooking the basics.
The other issue that some users expereince intermittently is the receipt would show “delivered” but not ” Read”. Several iMessages will show as “read” and you will actually see the time in a thread as well.
The last one on the chain will remain as “delivered”, never change to “read” yet the recipient will respond to the message. Clearly, it was read yet a read receipt isn’t displaying for all iMessages. That final message never gets a read receipt. This issue is an annoying but known bug.
There isn’t much that you can do on this issue other than restarting your idevice for the status to show correctly. If the issue proves to be a major hassle for you, you can try restoring your iPhone as New and see if that helps you with this trouble.
For more iOS 10 how-to’s, check out our iOS 10 Guide. If you are having other iMessage issues after updating to iOS 10, you can check out our troubleshooting guide for iMessage on iOS 10.
We hope you found this tip helpful. Please let us know in the comments below if you have other issues or if you would like to share a tip with the other readers!