How to Hide Text Messages on Your iPhone

Sometimes you might want to keep your messages private from people reading them – perhaps to protect your conversations from a competitive employer bugging emails between your colleagues, or to keep your girlfriend from seeing the surprise party that you’re planning with your friends.

Figuring out how to hide messages on your iPhone isn’t difficult. In fact, I found a couple of different ways to hide messages on your iPhone safely and securely – without permanently deleting any messages. You just need to know how to put them out of sight. So, here’s how you can hide your messages on your iPhone without losing them.

How to hide text messages on your iPhone

Your iPhone gives you options. your boss doesn’t want you receiving text messages at work, or you don’t want a text from your spouse to spoil a surprise – whatever the reason, you don’t have to send a text message in the open!

Hiding messages on your iPhone is no mean feat, but there are a number of ways of doing it, short of actually deleting them. We’ve rounded up some of the best solutions here, which use built-in iOS features, third-party apps, and some smart and clever tricks. Do you want to silence all notifications at once, or maybe mute just one message chain? Here’s how to do it.

How to protect what you’ve written without permanent oblivion: if you want to disappear a single conversation, hide it in the Messages app using invisible ink mode, so that message contents are invisible on lock screen and in Notification Center, and stay safely stored for later use in the form of encrypted notes (with a password, naturally).

How to hide iMessages

Sure, the iPhone is a technological marvel, but aside from giving the NSA access to glean your deepest, darkest secrets, there are other ways your messages can cripple your privacy. Happily, there are several methods to hide away messages on your iPhone — from disabling message previews to disabling alerts for selective text chains.

To prevent your iPhone from serving up a thumbnail preview of iMessages before they’re opened, you can go into Settings to deactivate the message preview, making it more difficult for people who might be spying on your phone to view your conversations.

Alternatively, utilise the obfuscating iMessage Invisible Ink (unfortunately not available in other operating systems), which will turn your text into a blurry image with a pulsating swirl of static on any other Apple device. Just press and hold the blue Send button when you’re ready to send, then tap Invisible Ink prior to sending.

You can even fence out text messages from certain contacts with the ‘Filter Unknown Senders’ feature in the Messages app, forcing their messages into a separate oblivion of their own while silencing their annoying alerts. Your secret is safe with them.

How to hide Facebook messages

There are several ways you can make messages on your iPhone less obvious. Turning off notifications, setting up disappearing chats, or putting apps behind Face ID or passcode will conceal your private dialogue from other people and, as long as you don’t lose or steal your phone, they won’t be able to read your private chats; when I say conceal here, I’m only speaking to strangers trying to get a peek.

Facebook gives you the right to mute or temporarily block messages from friends using its back-door, take-it-or-leave-it Messenger app Inbox. The Friend list’s inbox is akin to a spam Inbox, or an inbox that filters out spam from your friends you have no real friends with. Facebook has since rolled out a hidden inbox, ‘Message Requests’ for Facebook.com online logins, and an iOS mobile app that filters requests.

Or, reduce notifications for individual conversations by archiving it or deleting it. To delete a message, tap Edit, then Delete to confirm.

How to hide WhatsApp messages

If you use Whatsapp, you can archive your chats: they will disappear until one or both parties send a message again.

Third-party apps that allow you to set a passcode lock: while they won’t protect your WhatsApp conversations from being seen if the phone is physically stolen, they can add another level of privacy if someone is using your phone without your knowledge. These are also available for Android and iPhone.

Some third-party apps also possess a pin function that allows you to keep your favourite chats at the top of your conversation list, but it’s not as private as the other options you have for concealing your messaging.