Admittedly, I have a love/hate relationship with read receipts. I like getting them, and I don’t particularly mind sending them to people, but sometimes I want to read someone’s message in peace without notifying them until I’m ready to deal with the consequences.

You could go into Settings and disable read receipts temporarily, but this becomes more of a nuisance than it’s worth. Fortunately, a free jailbreak tweak called Delay Read Receipts (iOS 10) by iOS developer HiDan helps by preventing read receipts from getting sent to your recipient until you’re ready.

The tweak works by letting you to delay read receipts until you take specific actions in one of your iMessage conversations.

You’ll find a new preferences pane in the Settings app where you can choose what action triggers a read receipt to be sent to your recipient:

Along with toggling the tweak on or off on demand, you can choose whether read receipts are sent after you begin typing your reply message, or after you’ve tapped the send button after composing the reply message.

Both options give you the privacy to read your recipient’s messages without notifying them that their messages have been read, but they’ll still get their read receipt after you take your chosen action, which is a win/win for everybody involved. This gives you time to read their message in full and mull over a response for a while before you actually reply.

Yes, it defeats the purpose of read receipts, but it gives you more flexibility to read now and reply later without someone asking the ever-so-common question, “why haven’t you replied yet? You read my message X hours ago…” because it eventually gives the recipient the read receipt they want to see either way.

If you’re interested in trying Delay Read Receipts (iOS 10), you can grab it for free from Cydia’s BigBoss repository today. The tweak requires a jailbroken iOS 10 device be installed.

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Do you like the concept behind choosing how your read receipts are delayed? Share in the comments below.