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. We’ve got a guide here on 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’ll need to have been using an internet-based messaging app to send it, rather than the built-in messaging application.

When we say internet-based, we’re talking about the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, as well as Google’s downloadable Messages app.

These apps 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 WhatsApp on iOS, too.

You can find out more about WhatsApp’s read receipts here.

Similarly, Facebook Messenger shows the recipient’s profile picture in a tiny circle beneath the message to indicate that they’ve seen it, for example. 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

Unless you used WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger (see above for information on both of those) or iMessage when you sent your message on iPhone, you won’t be able to tell if someone has read your text message unless you ask them in person or over the phone.

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.

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.