If a fixed nighttime boundary fits your routine, you can download 9to9 from the App Store and choose the apps and websites you want quiet from 9 PM to 9 AM.
YouTube is the hardest app on this list to deal with, and it deserves to be treated differently — not because it is the most addictive, but because it is the most double-jointed. TikTok is purely a feed; YouTube is a feed and a library and a music player and a lecture hall and a sleep aid, all in the same icon. It is the app people use to put themselves to sleep and the app that keeps them up for three more hours doing it. Deleting it feels wrong because parts of it are genuinely good. Keeping it untouched means the same app that plays the rain sounds also autoplays the documentary you did not mean to start at midnight.
The workable answer is not to remove it — it is to separate the useful YouTube from the infinite one, and to block the app during the hours when the infinite one wins. Here is how to actually do that.
Why YouTube needs its own answer
Start with what makes it distinct. The autoplay is the mechanism — the next video queues itself, the countdown is already running, and the choice to keep watching is made by not choosing to stop. That is the opposite of every other feed's friction: most apps require a swipe to continue; YouTube requires an act to stop. At 11 PM, lying in the dark, the difference between “swipe to continue” and “act to stop” is the whole game — the default does the scrolling for you.
Add to that the content shape: YouTube sessions at night are rarely short-video loops. They are longer — a video essay, a documentary, a deep dive — which means the hour you lose is a different texture than the TikTok hour. You feel like you watched something, learned something, had a real evening. And you did, sort of — except it ended at 1 AM and the morning is worse for it. The version of YouTube that is a problem is specifically the night version, which is why a schedule rather than a limit is the right instrument.
And there is one more wrinkle that makes YouTube the hardest case: it has the strongest legitimate excuse. The sleep-aid use — the ambient video, the long mix, the lecture you drift off to — is real, and it gives the feed a standing alibi. “I need it to fall asleep” is the cover story under which the midnight session happens, which is why the audio problem below has to be solved before the block will hold.
The version of the problem that is not about sleep
Before the setup, one honest framing worth holding: YouTube at night is often less a sleep problem than a last-hour problem. The feed is not keeping you from sleep so much as it is the only thing making the end of the day bearable — the decompression, the thing that is finally yours. A block that removes it without replacing that function does not produce a better evening; it produces a resentful one. So keep the replacement part of the plan, below, as seriously as the block itself — the app is doing a job, and the job needs a new home.
Option one: Screen Time Downtime
The built-in route: Settings, then Screen Time, then Downtime — enable Scheduled, set your window, and turn on Block at Downtime. Then open Always Allowed and make sure YouTube is not on it. The model is everything-restricted-except-what-you-exempt, so YouTube is blocked during the window as long as it has not been given an exception.
While you are in Screen Time, it is worth a glance at App Limits too — a daily YouTube cap answers the volume question if that is also part of the problem. But for the specific issue of the app at night, the schedule is the tool. A limit that can be spent at midnight is not protecting the hour you are trying to protect.
Sources: Set schedules with Screen Time on iPhone (Apple Support)
A note on what a “limit” cannot do here
It is worth naming the tool that does not work for this, because it is the first thing people try. A daily YouTube limit — thirty minutes, an hour — sounds reasonable and fails on the specific thing that makes YouTube a nighttime problem: it does not care when the minutes happen. An hour's allowance can be spent entirely between midnight and 1 AM, and the limit that fires in bed is a limit that arrives at the exact moment you are least able to honor it. The volume rule answers the wrong question. The problem is not that you watch too much YouTube; it is that you watch it at the hour when it costs you the morning.
Option two: the fixed nightly block
The simpler shape: in 9to9, you select YouTube once — individually, or as part of a category if it is not the only feed — and it is shielded every night from 9 PM to 9 AM, automatically. No schedule to design, no allow-list to tend. The five-minute Temporary Access covers the moments when something real needs the app — a link someone sent, a video you genuinely have to watch — and then the block resumes on its own.
For YouTube specifically this approach has a particular fit: it removes the app during the exact hours when the autoplay is most dangerous, while leaving it completely normal during the day, when a YouTube video is just a YouTube video. You keep the library and lose the midnight session — which is the trade most people actually want when they say they want less YouTube.
The part where you keep the good parts
Because YouTube is the app where the keep-versus-block line matters most, it is worth saying explicitly what stays available when the app is shielded: the things that are not the feed. A video you deliberately choose and that ends — that is the good YouTube, and on a schedule it can be preserved in a way the scroll cannot. If a specific show or wind-down video is part of your night, the honest answer is to make it finite — the downloaded episode, the playlist with a stop, the thing that concludes — rather than to keep the whole app available for its sake.
The Safari question
An honest gap to name: blocking the YouTube app does not remove YouTube. If you are the kind of person who, finding the app blocked, opens Safari and types the address, the app-only block leaves a door open. The fix is to cover the route you actually use — add youtube.com to your website restrictions, or select the site in a blocker that handles websites alongside apps.
The way to find out whether this matters: watch your own behavior for a night or two after the app block starts. Most people never bother with the browser — the habit is attached to the app, and the app being unavailable is enough. If you do find yourself migrating to Safari, that is information, and the website block closes the gap. The goal is not to build a fortress against yourself; it is to notice the route you actually take and close that one.
There is a subtler version of the same point worth holding: the goal is not to make YouTube impossible, it is to make the midnight session not the default. A person determined to circumvent a block will — the point of the boundary is not to defeat a committed adversary, it is to make the easy thing the right thing. When the app is dark and the site is shielded, the idle evening stops auto-routing to the feed; whether someone could still find a way in is less important than the fact that they usually stop wanting to.
Solving the audio problem before you create it
This is the part that makes YouTube different from every other app-block guide, and it is the piece people most often skip: if you use YouTube to fall asleep — the ambient videos, the sleep stories, the long ambient mixes — then blocking it without replacing that function creates a problem the block will get blamed for. The useful job becomes the excuse that reopens the feed: you need the sleep audio, so you make an exception, and the exception is the app, and the autoplay is right there.
So solve the audio first, separately. Download a podcast episode or a playlist that ends. Use a music app for the ambient stuff. Save an offline track. Whatever it is, make the sleep-audio job belong to something with a stopping point — an episode that finishes, a timer that cuts — rather than to an app whose entire design is to never finish. The feed and the sleep aid can share a phone; they cannot share an app. Once the audio has a home with edges, the YouTube block stops having to defend two jobs at once, and it can just be the boundary it was meant to be.
The questions that come up
Can I block YouTube but keep YouTube Music? Usually, yes — they are separate apps in the picker, so you can block the feed and keep the music, which is exactly the right split for the audio problem.
Will the block kill a video that is already playing? The transition depends on iOS behavior at the boundary, but the new access is shielded when the schedule begins — and a video already running is a much smaller problem than the feed that never ends.
What about the one video I actually need at night? That is what the five-minute access is for — the errand, not the session. A specific video has an ending; the feed does not, and the block only needs to stop the second kind.
And a note on expectations: the first few nights after blocking YouTube are when people discover how much of their evening it was quietly carrying. The silence where the ambient video used to be is conspicuous at first — and it is worth meeting it with the replacement already staged rather than discovering, at 11 PM, that the thing you used to fall asleep to is gone and there is nothing in its place. The block works; the transition just needs the audio problem solved first.
The real shape of the answer, then: keep YouTube, lose the midnight YouTube. The app is too useful to delete and too well-built to resist at 11 PM — so do neither. Give it hours, like a store. It can be open all day and still be closed when it matters.