YouTube autoplay is like a waiter who refills your plate before you’ve decided whether you’re still hungry. Very polite. Very generous. And somehow it’s 1 a.m.
You watched one video on purpose. Then the countdown hit zero and the next one started, and the next, and at some point you were watching a man restore a rusty pocketknife with the focus of a surgeon. (Great video, honestly. Not what I opened the app for.)
Here’s how to switch autoplay off on your iPhone, plus the part most guides skip: the Shorts feed, which is basically autoplay with the brakes removed.
How to turn off autoplay in the YouTube app on iPhone
The quick answer: YouTube has an autoplay switch in its settings, and you can turn it off in about ten seconds.
- Open the YouTube app and tap your profile picture (the You tab) in the bottom-right corner.
- Tap the gear icon to open Settings.
- Tap Autoplay (in some layouts it lives under Playback).
- Turn off Autoplay next video.
You can also flip it from inside a video: tap the video once to show the controls, then tap the little autoplay toggle at the top of the player.
Now when a video ends, it just… ends. Revolutionary.
Stop videos from playing as you scroll the home feed
There’s a second, sneakier kind of autoplay. Thumbnails on your home feed start playing on mute as you scroll past them, like they’re waving at you from across the room.
That one’s a separate setting. In the same Settings menu, tap General, then Playback in feeds, and choose Off. Thumbnails stay still until you actually tap something.
What about Shorts autoplay?
This is where it gets annoying. Shorts don’t wait for a countdown. Swipe, and the next one is already playing. Swipe again, same thing. The whole feed is built so that the next video starts the instant you arrive.
That’s why people search for “disable YouTube Shorts autoplay” and come up empty. The autoplay switch above is about what happens after a regular video ends. It doesn’t change how the Shorts feed behaves, because the Shorts feed is the autoplay.
So the real fix isn’t a setting. It’s removing Shorts from the equation.
The fix that actually ends the loop: block Shorts
Scroll Less blocks full-screen Shorts inside the real YouTube app on your iPhone. You keep using YouTube the way you always do: search, regular videos, the channels you follow. When you tap into a Short (out of habit, it’s always out of habit), it’s blocked.
No Shorts feed, no swipe-swipe-swipe, no “how is it already midnight”. The endless-autoplay part of YouTube just isn’t there anymore.
Setup is short:
- Download Scroll Less from the App Store.
- Open it and follow the setup steps.
- Turn on Shorts blocking for YouTube.
- Go back to YouTube and use it like normal.
I wrote a full walkthrough of this in how to block YouTube Shorts on iPhone without deleting YouTube, if you want the long version.
Want a YouTube with nothing queued up at all?
Turning off autoplay stops the next video from starting. But the home feed and the Related videos column are still sitting there, full of very clickable thumbnails, waiting for your willpower to blink.
If you’d rather not see them at all, open YouTube in Scroll Less’s built-in browser. There you can hide the Home feed, Related videos and even Subscriptions. You get a search bar and the video you came for. That’s it.
It’s a weirdly calm way to use YouTube. You look something up, you watch it, and there’s nothing pulling you toward the next one.
Quick recap
- Regular autoplay: Settings, then Autoplay, then turn off Autoplay next video.
- Muted previews on the home feed: Settings, then General, then Playback in feeds, then Off.
- Shorts autoplay: block Shorts with Scroll Less.
- Nothing tempting queued up at all: hide the Home feed and Related videos in Scroll Less’s built-in browser.
Turn off the autoplay. Then turn off the Shorts.
The autoplay toggle is a nice start. But the loop that really eats your evening is the Shorts feed, and no toggle fixes that.
Get Scroll Less on the App Store and keep YouTube for the videos you actually choose.
Then go finish that pocketknife video. You’ve earned it.