How to block YouTube Shorts on your phone

Set the Shorts feed limit to zero

YouTube’s help page describes the setting:

1. Open the YouTube app and tap You

   Bottom right.

2. Tap Settings, then Time management

   Shorts feed limit is in that list.

3. Choose zero

   The list runs from zero up to two hours a day.

According to Tubefilter, which covered the change when zero became an option in April 2026, the Shorts shelf no longer appears on Home, and you get the “time’s up” prompt when you open your first Short in a session. If the shelf is still there right after you change it, close and reopen the app.

What still gets through

• The reminder can be dismissed. YouTube’s help says you’ll be “prompted with an option to dismiss or ignore your set limit.” One tap and you’re scrolling.
• Subscriptions and search can still show Shorts, according to reports on the change. The limit targets the Shorts feed, not every Short on YouTube.
• Links from friends still open in the Shorts player. The reminder appears, and one tap gets past it.

So treat zero as a speed bump with a good view: the endless shelf is gone from the first screen, which is where most accidental scrolling starts.

Show fewer Shorts

There’s a second, softer control. On the Home feed, scroll to a grid of Shorts, tap More at the top of the grid and choose Show fewer Shorts. It’s feedback for your recommendations rather than a setting, and YouTube lets you clear it later in My Activity. Use it alongside the limit, not instead of it.

For a child: a limit that holds

The limit works differently when a parent sets it. For a supervised account, open Family Center in YouTube’s settings, choose your child, then Time management, and set the daily Shorts feed limit. YouTube’s parental controls page says that when your child reaches it, they can’t scroll the Shorts feed for the rest of the day, and the limit resets each morning. More in our guide to blocking Shorts for kids.

What the phone itself can do

Screen Time on iPhone and Digital Wellbeing on Android see YouTube as a single app. They can cap it at, say, 30 minutes a day or block it outright, but they can’t tell a Short from a lecture. That makes them a blunt tool here: useful if YouTube in general is the problem, not if Shorts are. On an iPad the best option depends on who uses it; see Shorts on an iPad.

On a computer, Shorts can really be off

Browsers allow what the app doesn’t. With FeedCut in Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Opera, Shorts leave Home, search, Subscriptions and channel pages, and a /shorts/ link opens in the normal player instead of the swipe feed. If most of your Shorts time happens on the laptop, that’s the fix. If it happens on the phone, the limit at zero plus a deleted habit or two is as far as the app lets you go; our page on how to stop watching Shorts covers the habits.

Questions

Updated November 6, 2026