How often have you received a text from someone but failed to respond right away, leaving the other person wondering if you ever got their message? One way to avoid the suspense is with read receipts. By turning on this feature for all texts or just individual ones, the sender is alerted when you read their message even if you don’t respond.
On the flip side, you can suggest to friends, family members, and other contacts who own iPhones that they enable read receipts for your messages. You’ll then receive a notice whenever they read one of your texts.
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Built into Apple’s Messages app, read receipts support iMessage texts but not SMS texts. This means the feature will work with other iPhones (as well as iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches) but not with Android phones. Group messages don’t support read receipts either. Still, read receipts can be a handy option if you exchange a lot of messages with other iPhone users.
Here’s how to set this up.
How to set up read receipts for your iPhone’s text messages
What you’ll need: The only thing you’ll need for this is an iPhone running iOS 10 or later. You can also set up read receipts on an iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.
To turn on read receipts for anyone who texts you, go to Settings on your iPhone, select Messages, and then turn on the switch for “Send Read Receipts.”