Selective read receipts in TMWhatsApp: a privacy guide for Aussie users

Most Australians who rely on WhatsApp for daily chats have hit the same frustration at some point. The official client does not let you acknowledge a message from your cousin in Perth while pretending you never saw the meme your boss sent from Sydney. TMWhatsApp solves that problem by exposing the granular controls that stock WhatsApp deliberately hides, and the WhatsAppMods.org project keeps a running archive of every stable build so users in Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide can grab the right APK without hunting through forums.

Read receipts, those small blue or grey ticks that signal whether someone has opened a message, are governed globally inside standard WhatsApp. Either you broadcast the fact that you have read everything, or you sit in a state of perpetual silence that annoys friends and family. For Australians juggling group chats about weekend cricket, work threads after hours, and quiet DMs with their accountant, that binary switch is rarely enough.

TMWhatsApp, a fork maintained by third-party developers, breaks the binary open. You can leave receipts disabled by default and still turn them on for the handful of conversations where silence would be rude. The rest of this piece walks through the exact sequence of taps needed to make that happen on a stock Android handset, along with the small print that tends to trip people up the first time.

How read receipts work inside TMWhatsApp

Modified WhatsApp clients treat blue ticks as a layered setting rather than a single switch. The base layer sits inside Privacy, where the user chooses whether outgoing receipts are ever sent at all. Above that sits a per-chat override, which is the feature most people are looking for when they download a mod in the first place.

In TMWhatsApp the per-chat override is hidden behind a long press on a conversation header in the main chat list. The menu that pops up exposes a sub-menu called Privacy, and inside that sub-menu you can flip read receipts on for that one thread without touching the global default. The change is stored locally on the handset, so it travels with the app backup but never leaves the device in a readable form.

For users concerned about how that interacts with the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles, the local-only storage is worth noting. Nothing about the override is uploaded to Meta's servers, and TMWhatsApp does not sync the preference across devices the way the official multi-device beta does.

Preparing your phone before you change anything

A clean install makes the rest of the process far less painful. Australian Android handsets, particularly the Samsung Galaxy A-series and the Pixel 7a that have surged in Telstra and Optus stores over the last year, sometimes carry carrier bloatware that blocks APK installs by default. Head into Settings, then Apps, then Special access, and make sure Install unknown apps is granted to whichever browser you plan to use for the download.

Back up your existing chats first, either through Google Drive or by exporting the local database, because the modded client will replace the official one if you install it over the top. The detailed how-to-use walkthrough on the site walks through this step with screenshots, which is helpful if you have never sideloaded an APK before.

Mobile data in Australia is not cheap, so downloading the TMWhatsApp APK over a home NBN connection rather than a 4G or 5G hotspot will save a few hundred megabytes of quota. The package itself is around sixty megabytes, but the verification handshake that follows pulls a little more.

Finding the privacy controls inside the app

Once TMWhatsApp is installed and your number is verified, tap the three-dot overflow menu in the top right and choose TM Settings. From there the layout differs slightly between versions, but the path is consistent: Privacy and Security, then Blue Ticks. The screen that opens shows the master toggle at the top and, further down, a section called Contacts Exceptions or Custom Contacts.

That second section is the heart of the feature. It lists every contact stored on your device with two columns, one for always-on receipts and one for always-off. The list pulls from the local address book, so any contact saved with an Australian mobile prefix, +61, will appear alongside international entries.

Take a moment to think about which conversations actually matter before you start tapping. Friends who organise Saturday morning surfing at Bondi Beach or who coordinate the office morning tea in Parramatta are good candidates for always-on receipts. Strangers from marketplace buy-and-sell groups, or the relentless recruiters sliding into your DMs, are better left on the default off state.

Turning on blue ticks at the account level

If you want the per-chat override to work, the global toggle must first be activated. Open Privacy and Security again, tap Blue Ticks, and slide the main switch to the on position. The app will warn you that this change applies to every chat that does not have its own override, which is the behaviour you want.

Confirm the warning, return to the chat list, and watch the indicators update. Messages from contacts who are not on the exception list will now show blue ticks the moment you open the conversation, while the exception list continues to behave exactly as you configured it.

It is worth re-opening a couple of test chats after this step, ideally one where you want receipts and one where you do not, just to make sure the exception list took effect. Network latency on the Telstra 5G network can delay the tick update by a second or two, which sometimes fools people into thinking the override failed.

Hiding read status for individual conversations

For the conversations where you want silence, the flow is the opposite. Long press the chat header in the main list, choose Privacy, and switch off Send Read Receipts for that contact. The setting persists across app restarts and even survives a phone reboot, which is useful for Australians who commute long distances and regularly see their device power cycle on the train between Wollongong and Central Station.

If you change your mind later, the same long-press menu lets you re-enable the receipt without touching the global toggle. The interface is symmetric, so there is no risk of accidentally breaking the master switch while you tweak individual contacts.

One quirk worth flagging: if you block a contact through TMWhatsApp's block list and then unblock them, their exception status is reset to the default. It is a small bug that has been documented in the release notes for several recent versions, and reapplying the override takes only a few seconds.

Fixing issues when the feature does not behave as expected

The most common complaint is that receipts seem to work in one direction but not the other. If your friend can see your blue ticks but you cannot see theirs, the issue is almost always on their device. Send them a link to this guide or to the broader mod catalogue so they can replicate the setup on their own handset.

If your own overrides appear to be ignored, clear TMWhatsApp's cache through Android Settings, then restart the app. The local exception database occasionally becomes stale after a major version upgrade, and a cache wipe forces the app to rebuild it from scratch. Back up your chats before doing this, because the wipe also clears any unsent drafts sitting in the outbox.

For users who want to verify that the feature is working without alerting the other person, open a chat with yourself, known as a self-chat or note-to-self, and toggle the override on and off while watching the tick colour change. It is the simplest way to confirm everything is wired up correctly before you start tweaking real conversations across Sydney, Darwin, Hobart and the rest of the country.

Grab the latest stable build from the TMWhatsApp listing on WhatsAppMods.org, follow the steps above, and your read receipts will finally match the way you actually use the app rather than the way Meta decided you should.