There’s one other small but useful new feature in the iOS 10 Messages app that most people may have missed amidst of all the glitz and glamour of the shiny bubbles, stickers, and fireworks effects: you can now turn off Read Receipts for individual conversations. This is a huge boon if you like sharing read status with close friends and family but don’t necessarily want everybody to see when their messages to you have been read.
The setting can be found in the “Details” view when in an iMessage conversation — tap the “i” button in the top right corner and you should see a Send Read Receipts toggle right below the Do Not Disturb setting. As you’d expect, turning this off disables sending Read Receipts in the current conversation, and turning it on enables them; this overrides the global Read Receipts option found in the Messages section of the iOS Settings app. As an added bonus, the Read Receipts setting syncs via iCloud to all of your other devices, so if you’ve switched it off for a conversation on your iPhone, it should also be switched off on any Macs or iPads sharing the same iMessage and iCloud accounts.
One word of caution, however: changing the global Read Receipts setting will reset ALL of your per-conversation settings to match the global setting. Although this is useful if you want to quickly turn the setting on or off ALL of your conversations, it’s important to be aware of this so that you don’t inadvertently re-enable the setting where you may not intend to.
