Bypassing WhatsApp’s read receipts system

Seenzone people without them knowing

Have you been here?

Before I get into how I found a workaround for a WhatsApp feature after a little tinkering, I’m going to start off with the history of sending and receiving messages. It has always been important to let the sender know that their message was received intact. This is what pilots mean when they say “Roger that”. “Roger” was the phonetic alphabet for “R”, which was used in Morse and radio communications to mean “Received”.

On WhatsApp, a modern messaging service, users can not only know when their message is received by the target devices, but also whether the recipient has “seen” the message or not.

I discovered a way to see whole conversations, in groups and otherwise, without triggering the read receipt.

It began with my interest in the immersive mode. This is a full-screen mode on Android that hides the status bar and the navigation bar, thus offering the user a more immersive experience with the app.

I built and ran an Android app to test the immersive mode. Once this was done, the obvious question was “Alright, so my app was built to be compatible with this mode, but what if I force a full-screen upon the apps that are probably not prepared for it on my device?”.

This is when I turned to the app store, to find existing apps that could do this for me. I found a few apps that could create the OS-wide change of hiding the status and navigation bars. It’s important to note that some of these apps do not require rooting. However, when the navigation bar is hidden, the soft keyboard cannot be used.

I switched on the full screen mode and visited different apps. It was immediately seen that some apps filled up the extra space left behind by the two bars, some kept the status bar, while others, especially default apps like the clock and android settings occupied the same screen space while leaving the new empty space blank.

Now that the apps’ basic response to the full screen was seen, it was time to see how their functionality was affected. All the apps functioned pretty well despite this change… except WhatsApp.