Shorts Begone: Modding YouTube on iOS (without jailbreaking)

The speaker starts from a personal annoyance: the Shorts feed in the YouTube app keeps pulling viewers into long, unplanned sessions. Inspired by an earlier project that modded TikTok, the goal was to change a stock iOS app on a phone that cannot be jailbroken. The talk gives a short history of iOS modding, from the restricted early iPhone years through the period of popular tweaks, and explains why that scene has slowed.

The method has three stages: obtain a decrypted app package, sideload it with an in-app debugging overlay, then inspect the view hierarchy to find the Shorts tab and its playback screen. The speaker explains method swizzling, first hiding the tab with a runtime hook and then simulating a back action whenever a Short starts playing. Other tools covered include Flex for live inspection, Theos and Logos to reduce boilerplate, and running an iOS app on an Apple silicon Mac so LLDB can attach to it. A demo also showed an AI agent driving LLDB to locate and change UI elements, with uneven results.

The main takeaways are that app packages are signed and encrypted, but decrypted copies can be sideloaded under free or paid developer accounts, with re-signing needed on a weekly or yearly cycle. Hooks break when the app updates, so a fixed version is the practical target. The Q&A covered how long a decrypted build stays usable and whether community tooling can keep pace with YouTube changes.