How Read Receipts Work on Stitch

The three message states

Every message you send on Stitch moves through up to three states. Sent means the message left your device and reached Stitch's servers. Delivered means it reached the recipient's device. Read means the recipient actually opened the chat and saw it. These are shown as a small status indicator near your message, and they update in real time as the recipient comes online, opens the app, and opens that specific conversation.

In a group chat, "read" naturally becomes more nuanced, since a message might be read by some members and not others — see the group chats section below for how Stitch handles that.

What actually marks a message as read

A message is marked read when the recipient opens the conversation it is in — not when it merely arrives, and not from a notification preview alone. If you read a message from the lock-screen notification without opening the app, Stitch does not count that as having read it, because the app itself has no way to know you saw the banner. Only opening the actual chat triggers the read state.

Turning read receipts off — and what you give up

In Settings → Privacy & Security, you can turn Read Receipts off. When you do, your messages will always show as delivered to the people you message, even after you have opened and read them.

The trade-off is symmetrical, the same way it works on most messaging apps: turning your read receipts off also turns off your ability to see other people's read receipts. You will see every message you send settle at "delivered" and never advance to "read," regardless of whether the other person actually opened it. This is intentional — it stops read receipts from becoming one-directional surveillance where you can watch others without them being able to watch you.

Read receipts in group chats

In a one-to-one chat, "read" is unambiguous. In a group, Stitch tracks message status per member, since a message can be delivered to five people and read by only three. The status shown for a group message generally reflects delivery and read progress across the group rather than a single flag, which is why group read behavior can feel less precise than a direct chat — there are simply more people involved.

Muting a group does not affect read receipts at all; muting only silences notifications, while read status is driven purely by whether you have opened the conversation.

Common situations that confuse people

• "It says delivered but I know they're online" — the recipient may have their app open to a different chat, or may have read receipts turned off, both of which cap the status at delivered.
• "I saw the message in a notification but it still shows unread on my end" — expected: a notification preview does not count as opening the chat.
• "My message to a group shows read but I know not everyone has seen it" — group status reflects the group's aggregate read progress, not a guarantee that every single member has read it.
• "I turned off read receipts but I still see old read statuses" — the setting only affects future messages and status updates going forward; it does not retroactively hide read marks that were already recorded before you changed it.

Deciding whether to turn read receipts off

Read receipts are a reasonable default for most people, since they add useful context to a conversation — knowing a message was read (rather than just delivered) helps you judge whether a lack of reply means "busy" or "hasn't seen it yet." The setting is worth turning off if you regularly open messages before you are ready to respond and would rather not signal that, or if you simply prefer not sharing that level of detail with everyone you chat with.

Because the setting is mutual and reversible, there is no wrong choice — try it either way and change it back at any time from Settings → Privacy & Security.

A subtlety worth knowing: the setting is not per-chat

Unlike muting, which applies to one chat at a time, read receipts are a single account-wide setting — there is no way to show read status to one contact but hide it from another. If you want that level of granularity (comfortable being tracked by close friends, not by everyone), the honest answer is that Stitch does not currently offer a per-contact version of this setting; the choice is on or off for every conversation at once. Knowing this upfront avoids the confusion of expecting the setting to behave differently in different chats.

Read receipts and message editing

If you edit a message after it has already been read, the read status generally stays as it was — editing does not reset a message back to an unread or undelivered state, since the recipient already has the notification and context that a message exists there. This means an edited message may not automatically re-surface the same attention its original version got; if the change is significant enough that you want to be sure the other person notices, it is often better to send a short follow-up message than to rely on an edit alone.