Block YouTube Shorts and keep the lectures

Shorts is the hardest thing on a phone to block well, because it is not an app. It is a feed inside an app most people genuinely need, and almost every blocker only understands whole apps. Block YouTube and the lectures go with it; leave it open and the Shorts tab is one tap from every video you meant to watch.

What it blocks, precisely

Opening Shorts — from the Shorts tab, or by tapping a Short on the home shelf — brings up Spark's block screen. The watch page, search, your subscriptions and playlists carry on working. The Shorts shelf still appears on Home; the block bites when you open it, not before.

Two other feeds ship with the same mechanism and are off by default: Snapchat Spotlight and Facebook Reels. Instagram Reels is deliberately not on that list — we could not block it reliably without breaking the rest of the app, and a switch that half-works is worse than an honest absence.

The stronger version: a channel allowlist

A blocklist is always one new obsession behind. An allowlist is the list of what you actually came for. Name your four or five lecture channels and only those play — everything else on YouTube, Shorts included, hits the block screen.

One practical detail the app will nag you about: give a channel's name as well as its @handle. A channel saved from a Short by handle alone can still play on the watch page, which is exactly the gap you were trying to close.

Blocking it even when nothing is locked

A feed can be blocked all the time rather than only during sessions. That is a separate switch, and it is the one most people end up using for Shorts: the feed is not something they want back at the end of a session, it is something they want gone.

Why Android only

Telling a Shorts player apart from a watch page means reading what is on screen, which on Android is the accessibility service — a broad permission you grant deliberately. Apple's Screen Time framework does not expose that, so on iPhone a blocker can block YouTube or not block it, and nothing in between. The app says so on the screen itself rather than showing an iPhone owner a switch that does nothing.

The honest limits

• Android only, for the reason above.
• It needs the accessibility service. That is a powerful permission, and you should grant it only to software you are prepared to trust with it.
• YouTube redesigns its app. When a redesign moves the Shorts player, the rule that recognises it needs updating — rules are published from our side, so a fix does not need an app update, but there can be a gap.
• Instagram Reels is not blocked on its own; blocking it means blocking Instagram.