How to block YouTube Shorts on iPhone

Here’s the trap: you open YouTube to watch one specific thing — a recipe, a tutorial, a song — and somewhere in the next hour you surface from a swipe-swipe-swipe blur of Shorts you never chose to watch. The Shorts feed is the single most efficient rabbit hole on your phone, because it’s vertical, endless, and one thumb-flick away from every screen in the app. You didn’t decide to watch forty of them. The feed decided for you.

The honest problem: YouTube doesn’t give you a real off switch for Shorts. You can hide the row for a while, but it always comes back. So let’s do the free things that actually help first — then the thing that holds when the free stuff quietly reverts.

First, the free tweaks inside YouTube

Do these today, no app required. They genuinely reduce how often Shorts ambushes you:

Hide the Shorts shelf temporarily. On the Home tab, tap the × in the corner of the “Shorts” row → Hide. YouTube stops showing that shelf — for about 30 days. Set a reminder, because it silently comes back.
Turn off Shorts history so the feed gets boring. Go to your profile → Settings → Manage all history → YouTube History, and pause watch history (or clear it). A feed with nothing to personalize is far less sticky.
Don’t tap the first one. Shorts autoplay the moment you enter the feed, and the first swipe is the whole trap. If you never open the tab, the loop never starts. Obvious, and genuinely the highest-leverage habit here.

These help. Their limit is honesty: every one of them is easy to undo, and YouTube is designed to walk them back — the shelf reappears, history turns itself useful again, and one bored tap on the Shorts tab restarts everything. Friction you can remove in the exact moment you’re trying to resist isn’t much friction.

Use Apple’s built-in Screen Time (free, blunt)

Apple’s own Screen Time can block the whole YouTube app for stretches of the day. It can’t target just Shorts — iOS sees “YouTube,” not the feed inside it — so this is all-or-nothing on the app. If Shorts is your problem and you rarely need the rest of YouTube, that’s a fair trade:

Downtime: Settings → Screen Time → Downtime. Set a window (say, work hours or after 9pm) when only apps you allow will open. YouTube stays locked until the window ends.
App Limits: Settings → Screen Time → App Limits → Add Limit → Entertainment (or pick YouTube specifically). When the timer’s up, the app greys out.

It’s free and it works. The catch most people hit: the limit screen has an “Ignore Limit → Ignore for Today” button one tap away, and the Screen Time passcode is easy to bypass when it’s your passcode and your resolve wearing thin at 11pm. Apple built the escape hatch on purpose. That’s exactly the moment a blunt tool loses.

When the feed keeps winning: block it on a schedule

If you’ve tried the above and the Shorts hole keeps swallowing your evenings, the fix isn’t more willpower — it’s putting the block up before the urge arrives, in a form that’s harder to wave away in the moment. That’s what Paused does.

Two ways to use it against Shorts specifically:

A Block Schedule for the danger hours — the after-dinner slump, the first hour of work, the last hour before bed. YouTube is already locked when the urge shows up, so there’s no “just one video” to negotiate with.
A Focus session for right now: one tap, pick how long, and YouTube’s off the table while you cook, work, or actually finish the tutorial you opened it for.

When you do reach for it out of habit, the tap lands on a calm Paused screen instead of the feed — a two-second pause that hands the decision back to the version of you that made the schedule, not the bored one at 11pm. And because every blocked-and-honored day stacks a streak, checking the streak slowly becomes the small reward instead of checking Shorts.

Paused blocks through Apple’s Family Controls, so it never sees what you watch — it can’t read your feed or your history, only flip the app on or off on the schedule you set.

The honest takeaway

Start free: hide the shelf, pause your history, and try not to tap the first Short. If YouTube keeps clawing those settings back — and it will — Apple’s Screen Time can lock the whole app, escape hatch and all. And when even that isn’t enough because the off switch is too easy to flip, a schedule that’s already up before the urge is the piece that actually holds the line. You keep YouTube for the videos you meant to watch. You just lose the rabbit hole you didn’t.