One of the things that happens with WhatsApp is that everything we do in the app is logged in some way, and we refer specifically to what we do with information that comes to us from others. They know when we received the messages, when we read them and the same goes for videos, audios and even documents. It’s not easy to be able to say “I didn’t read you” credibly unless, in fact, you haven’t read it.
But there is a way to become a ninja against the forces of information when it comes to audio. It is possible to listen to audios and that the one who sent them to us does not know it, so we can choose when to respond to them, or when to reveal that we finally read them. Of course, for now this trick is limited to Android due to its access to internal files. We show you how.
WhatsApp knows what you do inside the app but not what you do outside
When you access the information of a message you sent through WhatsApp, the application tells you several things about it. It tells you if the other person received the message on their phone, it tells you if the other person has read said message and, in the case of audio, it also tells you if the other has played them. If you gave the to play. In this case, if you pressed play. And in addition, it also indicates when each of the steps described above occurred.
But being under Android there is a way to camouflage the listening of audios. We can hear them without the application knowing about it and, therefore, without marking said audio as “played”. For this we will have to use a file explorer on our phone. For our tutorial, we used Google Files which are installed on Pixels but any other would work. Our mission is simple: access the folder where WhatsApp saves the audio.
Paragraph: we are going to activate the automatic downloading of audios
Before that, however, we will need that our whatsapp download the audios automatically. Sorry, this is a necessary step. If our WhatsApp does not download the audio by default, we will have to enter the conversation and press the download button, then our trick to be able to say “I haven’t seen it so far” will be lost. So, enable automatic downloading of audios. This is done as follows:
Settings> Storage and data> Download with mobile data> We mark ‘Audios’. And once done, we repeat with ‘Download with WiFi’ and with ‘Data roaming’.
Clever. The audios are now downloaded without us having to do anything. Someone sends them to us and as soon as we have a connection, the audio is recorded on the phone. It means that to the other person, it appears as “Delivered”, and nothing else. This does not mean that we have read it or that we have reproduced it. Now yes, we open the file browser of our Android.
Now yes we will locate our audio without WhatsApp knowing
Navigating through the files, we locate the folder with WhatsApp audios, ready to listen
We have file browser and auto download. The next step is locate the folder where WhatsApp saves received audios
Almacenamiento interno > Android > Media > com.whatsapp > WhatsApp > Media > WhatsApp Voice Notes
Once we are in this folder, we must scroll until locate the last folder created by the application. We will see that a folder is created for each day and that it is signed YEAR+NUMBER. In our case, the folder corresponding to today is 202223. That is, folder 23 of 2022. WhatsApp, however, puts the date of its last modification and it will be easier to locate it.
Listening to the audio from outside, WhatsApp doesn’t know if we heard it. Bingo.
Now we access said folder and inside we will have the audios that we received that day. Since we were looking for the latest file, we have the audios received today, ordered by date received. Now we just need to locate the audio we are looking for and play it from there, just click on the file. Ready, we heard our WhatsApp audio and the app doesn’t know anything. Nothing at all. So you can’t tell anyone we heard it because you just don’t know.
