How to tell if someone has read your text

If you’ve sent that one important message and you want to know if the recipient is taking a while to reply, or just ignoring you, we’re going to show you how to find out.

Here’s how to tell if someone has read your message on iOS or Android.

How to tell if someone has read your text on Android

In order to tell whether someone has read a message you’ve sent them, you need to have been using an internet-based messaging app to send it, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Apple iMessage.

You can’t get tell if someone has read a regular text message (SMS) on either Android or iOS.

Internet-based apps send messages over a web connection as opposed to the mobile network. Being online allows them to come with sent, delivered and read indicators that’ll help you know whether your message actually got through to their phone successfully, and in turn whether they’ve actually seen it.

In WhatsApp, for example, one tick means that your message was successfully sent, two grey ticks mean that it was delivered to the recipient’s phone, and two blue ticks means that they read it. In group messages, the two ticks will only appear when all of the participants have received and read the message.

This applies to read receipts on WhatsApp on iOS as well as Android.

In WhatsApp, both you and the recipient must have read receipts toggled on in Settings > Privacy. If only one of you does, then you’ll both only see double grey ticks to show the message has been delivered, but they will never turn blue to indicate it has been seen.

Facebook Messenger shows the recipient’s profile picture in a tiny circle beneath the message to indicate that they’ve seen it. If they’ve yet to see it but it’s been delivered successfully, it’ll be a blue tick instead.

How to tell if someone has read your text on iPhone and iMessage

You can tell if your message has been sent via iMessage in Apple’s messaging app because it’ll be blue. If it’s green, it’s an ordinary text message and doesn’t offer the read/delivered receipts. iMessage only works when you’re sending messages to other iPhone users using the Messages app.

Even then, you’ll only see that they’ve read your message if they’ve turned on the ‘Send Read Receipts’ option in Settings > Messages.

If they have got the Send Read Receipts option turned on, you’ll be able to see that they’ve read your message just underneath the message itself. It’ll say ‘Read’, and then the date (day if it was within the past week or time if it was today) that they read it.