The two official options, and what they really do
Search this question and you'll get two answers repeated everywhere. Both are real. Neither is permanent.
Option one: hide the Shorts shelf. Tap the three-dot menu on the Shorts row in your home feed and choose Hide. This works, and it's genuinely the best thing available inside the app. It also expires after 30 days, at which point the shelf comes back without telling you. You can re-hide it, forever, every month.
Option two: turn off watch history. This is the nuclear option people recommend when the first one runs out. Pausing your watch history strips personalization from the home feed, which does dramatically reduce Shorts. It also empties out your recommendations entirely, breaks "continue watching," and makes the app noticeably worse at the things you actually wanted from it. Most people turn it back on within a week.
Notably, neither one removes the Shorts tab from the bottom navigation bar. It sits there between Home and Subscriptions, one accidental thumb-press away, for as long as you have the app installed.
Why there's no real off switch
Shorts is YouTube's answer to TikTok, and it's the surface where they're competing hardest for time. An off switch would be a direct hit to the metric the feature exists to move. The 30-day hide is the compromise: enough to answer the complaint, short enough not to matter.
This is worth naming plainly because it explains why every guide to this question is unsatisfying. The setting you're looking for isn't hidden. It doesn't exist.
What's left: use the web version
Here's the thing that changes the math. YouTube's mobile website is a full YouTube: search, subscriptions, comments, playlists, the normal player, all of it. And unlike the native app, a web page can be modified by a Safari extension before it renders.
That means on the web version you can:
- Remove the Shorts shelf permanently, not for 30 days.
- Remove the Shorts tab from the navigation bar entirely, so there's nothing to mis-tap.
- Open Shorts links in the normal player, so a link someone sends you still works but doesn't drop you into a vertical swipe feed.
- Make Home open your Subscriptions feed, so the algorithmic home page stops being the first thing you see.
- Hide the suggested-videos rail under a playing video, which is where most unplanned YouTube time actually comes from.
None of that is available in the app, and all of it is stable. It doesn't expire.
Making the web version the default
The obvious objection: you're not going to remember to open Safari instead of tapping the app icon. Correct, and that's the part most guides skip.
iOS Shortcuts can close the gap. A personal automation set to run when the YouTube app opens can immediately hand you off to the cleaned-up web version instead. Once it's set, tapping the YouTube icon does the right thing without you thinking about it.
That's the whole design of DoomOff: a Safari extension that fixes the site, plus a guided Shortcut that makes the fixed version the one you land on. Every toggle above is a switch in the app, and you can see exactly what each one does before you turn it on.
The Shorts shelf stays gone. Not for 30 days. For good.