What a Safari extension can actually see
A Safari Web Extension runs against web pages loaded inside Safari. It can read the page, hide elements on it, rewrite what loads, all before you see it rendered. That's the mechanism behind every toggle in this library: hide the Shorts shelf, remove the Explore grid, default a feed to Following.
What it cannot do is reach into a separate native app. Instagram's iOS app and Safari are different processes, sandboxed from each other by design, and no extension, from DoomOff or anyone else, gets to cross that boundary.[1] An extension that claimed to modify the native Instagram app directly would be describing something iOS doesn't permit.
Why that isn't a limitation of DoomOff specifically
This is true of every app on iOS, not a gap in one extension's engineering. Apple's own documentation on Safari's content-blocking model describes it as a deliberately narrow, declarative system: an extension hands Safari a set of rules, and Safari applies them to web content, with no equivalent path into a native app's rendering.[2] The narrowness is the design. It's also what keeps the extension from needing broad, invasive permissions to do its job.
Why the fix works anyway
YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Reddit, X, and LinkedIn all ship a full web version, not a stripped-down mobile placeholder. Feed, search, comments, messages, all of it works. That web version is a normal web page, which means it's exactly the kind of thing a Safari extension can act on.
So the fix isn't "get inside the native app." It's "make the web version, which the extension can already reach, the one you actually use." That's the second half of the mechanism: a guided iOS Shortcut that intercepts the app icon and opens the cleaned-up web version in Safari instead, so tapping the familiar icon out of habit still lands you somewhere the fix applies.
What this means in practice
Nothing about your account changes, nothing gets installed inside Instagram or TikTok, and there's no server involved reading what you do. The entire fix lives in two places you already control: what Safari shows you, and where the app icon actually sends you. That's a narrower claim than "blocks the app," and it's also the honest one.