Whatsapp, Ios, and replying to messages

By Bingo Little, 26 January, 2026

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

The situation, folks, is this: every time I read a message in reply to another message in a Whatsapp chat, Voiceover now reads the original message before reading the reply. I can see in theory why this might sound like a splendid idea but for myself, I find it extremely annoying. I've read replies to very long messages recently, and having to listen to the whole original message again before I hear the reply is extremely irksome. What are people's thoughts? Is this a feature, or a bug? Do you like the new behaviour? Is there any way of reverting to the old behaviour for those of us who find this annoying or am I just going to have to get used to it? Using IOS26.2 on an iPhone 16 Pro Max.

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Comments

By Gar on Monday, January 26, 2026 - 13:33

Hi there,
There's no way to revert to the old behavior. But you can work around it. Swipe down on the message a few times, and you can copy it. Then you can paste it into the text field to read it and undo once you're done. I realize this is convoluted, but it's either that, suffer through a message of varied length, or switching platforms. Which I know not everyone is inclined to do, even when you're dealing with companies like the Facebook company.

By Ann Marie B on Monday, January 26, 2026 - 15:05

Hello. I experience the same problem with VO and what's app message replies. I hope it's a bug and gets resolved soon. :)