YouTube's made a tweak to its mobile apps that I've been waiting for over what feels like years. The update's live on iOS and seems to be rolling out on Android, too, bringing a crucial control to how Shorts appear in your app, and letting you effectively disable the vertical video feed.
For a while now, if you went to the Settings cog in the YouTube app, you'd see a Time Management section, and the option to set up a time limit on how much time you could spend scrolling the Shorts feed in a day.
Frustratingly, though, the lowest setting available in this app was 15 minutes, suggesting that Google knew people might want to disable the arguably addictive feed, but didn't want to offer that option. Now, though, there's a new option: 0 minutes.
Selecting it removes Shorts from your homepage entirely, making it far less likely that you'll fall into a scrolling pit the moment you open the app. You can still view individual Shorts, whether through a search or via a channel, but if you try to scroll to a new video, you'll be greeted by a message about your time limit being full.
To speak my truth, this is massive for me. After years of successfully resisting the lure of Instagram's Reels and the whole of TikTok, the last 18 months have seen YouTube Shorts get their hooks into me against my will. I probably watch more YouTube than any other streaming service, and while short-form video doesn't hold interest for me in an intellectual sense, the addictiveness is hard to ignore.
Being able to disable Shorts is something I've wanted for ages, and as a paid-up YouTube Premium subscriber, I'm disappointed it's taken this long, and that it's disguised behind time management settings like this. Then again, I'll take what I can get, and I'm hoping this helps me (and others) to get a clean break from the whole short-form ecosystem.
One other disappointment is that this doesn't appear to be coming to the browser or desktop version of YouTube, and seems to be per-device rather than attached to your account. That means you might need to set it up on whatever devices you use YouTube's app on to get it working.
I'll see in the next month or so whether this helps me kick the video junk food that is the Shorts Feed entirely, but I'm hopeful it'll be banished at least when I'm using my phone, which is a small victory but a victory nonetheless.
