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YouTube Shorts have become a go-to source for quick entertainment—but for many, they’ve also turned into a never-ending scroll trap. The addictive, swipe-after-swipe format makes it easy to lose track of time. Now, YouTube is working on a new feature designed to help users break the doomscrolling habit. This upcoming tool aims to limit excessive scrolling and promote healthier viewing patterns, offering a much-needed break from the infinite stream of short-form content.

If your day consists of browsing any social platforms, there is a good chance you have disengaged your mind and lost track of time, viewing countless short videos. In many cases, this can be detrimental to an individual’s health. Research indicates that the excessive use of short video apps is resulting in a lack of attention, ineffective time usage, and learning decline.

Regardless, according to Google, YouTube Shorts receives over 70 billion views daily. The company has been quite aggressive in promoting Shorts, offering features that allow for effortless video creation. However, it appears that Google now understands how addictive Shorts can be, along with the damage they could inflict on users.

Following the 20.15.32 beta version of the YouTube application, Android Authority performed an APK teardown and uncovered that Google is developing a feature designed to aid users in controlling the amount of time spent on YouTube Shorts.

The newest beta comes with new strings outlining a dedicated daily Shorts scrolling timer, not associated with the general “Take a break” reminder for videos. This new Shorts timer appears to be meant to stop infinite scrolling through Shorts at a user-set daily limit. Below is the code string that Android Authority found in the their APK teardown.

<string name="shorts_time_picker_bottom_sheet_title">Pause scrolling after</string>

<string name="shorts_daily_timer_setting_summary">{number_of_hours, plural, offset:1 =0 {Scrolling is paused after {number_of_minutes} minutes

but you may still see individual Shorts} =1 {Scrolling is paused after {number_of_hours} hour but 

you may still see individual Shorts} other {Scrolling is paused after {number_of_hours} hours 

but you may still see individual Shorts} }</string>

Essentially, once the new YouTube Shorts timer reaches your Shorts watching limit, the user will not be able to scroll through Shorts anymore. It looks as though YouTube will not disable watching Shorts completely. Shorts that play in other areas of the site (like the Home feed or search results) will still be viewable as per the code text. 

When this feature will be available for everyone is still unknown, but its inclusion in the beta version indicates that YouTube is likely working on this. We will continue tracking updates for YouTube to see if more information is released about it. Whether that actually helps users take a break from the swipe-happy Shorts experience is something we’ll have to wait and see.

That was it guys, for this article. Keep an eye out on Jagran English for more such updates!

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