YouTube may soon let you set a daily limit on how long you watch, and it would cover everything in the app. Strings found in a beta build of the YouTube app for Android refer to an “App time limit”, separate from the Shorts-only limit the app has today. Google has not announced it.
YouTube already has several ways to rein in watching. You can limit Shorts viewing, get reminders to take a break or go to bed, and see a graph of your daily viewing under Settings, then Time management. Nothing in the app stops you after a set time on ordinary long videos, so people who want that currently have to use Android’s Digital Wellbeing timers for the whole app.
The find comes from Android Authority’s teardown of version 21.44.534-BETA. Its writers read the new strings as a limit that counts any YouTube viewing, Shorts included, rather than a second Shorts control. What the strings do not show is the interface, whether the limit would be a hard stop or something you could tap past, or whether it would come with the same options as the Shorts timer.
Features spotted in app code do not always reach users, and Google has made no statement on this one. If it does ship, it would let people cap YouTube from inside the app instead of through Digital Wellbeing, which sets limits per app across the phone.
There is no date for a rollout, and Android Authority says it hopes to spot more progress in later builds.
