Hi all!
I am trying to disable Youtube shorts on the native Android app (it doesn’t work well with my addictive personality!). I am struggling to do so, and so I was considering deactivating the app through the Fairphone settings. I received a notification telling me that Android and other Apps might not work well if I do that. Does anyone have experience with that? That would be super helpful.
My YouTube app shows only regular videos in my Home tab, unless I open the Shorts tab. You don’t have this same behavior? You see a mix of Shorts and regular videos in your main feed? I only see a mix of Shorts and regular videos in my subscription feed. Fairphone can’t really change the YouTube app 
What I am trying to do is to disable the shorts tab, or to deactivate the Youtube app all together from the phone (I don’t think that deleting it is possible). The shorts appear on the main feed, and in the tab too. What I am wondering is whether this will effectively affect overall Android performance, like the warning seems to indicate!
This warning is a generic message that to my knowledge is shown when deactivating any app.
In the case of Youtube I’m pretty confident it doesn’t affect overall performance of the system.
And even if something wouldn’t work you can just enable it again.
IMHO the warning probably makes more sense when disabling a system app with a “cryptic” name and without “proper” icon. Those that are only shown if you explicitly enable it.
Just to give an example what kind of negative effect diabling an app could have: if you disable the “Google” app, the search bar on the home screen becomes useless and the stock camera app can no longer scan QR codes. But those become functional again as soon as the “Google” app is enabled again.
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Many thanks, that is super useful!
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Maybe try this, open your browser on a desktop (or enable desktop mode on your phone’s browser) and then hit the X in the Shorts row’s upper right corner in your overview. I clicked that once and then it was gone from my home feed on my browser. Maybe this change also affects your app experience. I don’t see shorts in my home feed.
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You can disable the app without any problems, I’ve done that multiple times. After that, the only change is that YouTube links default to your browser, not the app.
I’ve recently done the following to try to limit the usage of YouTube, and I actually prefer the result to completely disabling YouTube:
- Go to your profile in YouTube app (lower right corner).
- Click settings or the cog symbol (now in upper right corner).
- Click Your data in YouTube
- Disable Watch history
As per recently, YouTube now disables both the main feed and shorts feed when you disable the watch history, as the recommendation algorithm doesn’t work if the app doesn’t know what you’ve watched. The only feed left is your subscriptions feed, which only shows newest videos from the channels you subscribe to, which I very much prefer to the main feed.
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That’s a great tip - I have done those steps and it really improved my YouTube experience too!
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