Read receipts on Android phones are a function of Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging that has replaced SMS. It brings enhanced features like typing indication, read receipts, and multimedia sharing to native texting apps on Android phones, providing functionality similar to third-party apps like WhatsApp.
Things were a lot simpler with SMS. You’d send a text message to someone and not know even if it was delivered, let alone read by them, or just lost in cyberspace. If you didn’t want to respond to someone, you could just say you never got the text or that you saw it late. RCS has switched things up and now anyone who wants that level of control needs to keep read receipts off.
Many people appreciate read receipts as the feature lets them know when the recipient has looked at their texts, but a lot more are interested in finding out how to turn off read receipts on Android. They’d rather not have the sender know when they’ve read the message.
Whether that’s just for plausible deniability or they’d not be questioned about why they’re taking so long to respond after reading a text, there can be any number of reasons why you’d want to turn off read receipts.
Fortunately, figuring out how to turn off read receipts on Android isn’t that hard. Most of these devices come with Google Messages as the native texting app, and it’s just a simple toggle that needs to be switched. Samsung made Google Messages the default SMS app on its phones a couple of years ago so this guide applies to Galaxy phones as well as other Android phones running the app.
To turn off Google Messages read receipts, launch the app and tap on your avatar in the top right corner. Tap on Messages settings followed by RCS cats. There you’ll see a toggle for Send read receipts. Tap on it to turn read receipts off.
Remember, Google Messages read receipts are enabled by default. So if you’ve recently moved over from another texting app or have only just bought your first Samsung Galaxy phone, follow these simple steps to turn off read receipts for good.
