YouTube app bug opens and auto-plays Shorts by default, here’s how to fix it

Ben Schoon | Mar 16 2025 - 11:30 am PT

A bug with the YouTube app is causing Shorts to open as soon as the app starts up for some users.

YouTube has put a lot of emphasis on Shorts in recent years, with the TikTok-like experience getting a dedicated tab in the YouTube app for mobile devices, showing up in Home and Subscription feeds, and more. For some users, though, an ongoing bug is causing the YouTube app to open directly to Shorts rather than opening to the homepage.

For some time now, users have noticed that YouTube will directly open to Shorts if the last thing viewed the last time the app was opened was from Shorts. More recently, though, there’s been a growing trend where the YouTube app opens to Shorts regardless of what was previously viewed.

We’ve noticed on a Nothing Phone (3a) and a Pixel 9 Pro Fold that, with the current YouTube app version, Shorts will open by default if the Shorts experience has been opened at all. Going “back” shows the homepage as expected, and UI artifacts when the first Short loads implies that the app is simply opening Shorts immediately, by error, “over” the normal homepage. Reports on Reddit show that this is happening to more and more users in the past couple of weeks, though it’s not clear how widespread it is.

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Closing and force stopping the app has no impact on this behavior, but a “reset” (clear storage/cache) does revert this problem. Once Shorts are opened again, though, the issue returns. We’ve not been able to confirm if this is happening on iOS. Since YouTube is pre-installed on Android, a full uninstall isn’t possible, but “uninstall updates” via the Play Store works the same way.

Are you running into this issue? Let us know in the comments below.