BrainGuard is a Safari extension for iPhone that hides the infinite feeds, reels, ads and keeps the features you want.
- Six services
- 26 switches
- No account
- Free
Switch by switch
Twenty-six switches, and you decide every one.
Nothing is on when you install it. Turn off the Shorts shelf but keep comments. Lose the Stories tray and keep Explore. There is no recommended configuration, because the thing that pulls at you isn't the thing that pulls at me.
See the full list →Nothing breaks
The page still works. It just stops starting a session for you.
Blockers break layouts and leave you staring at a white rectangle wondering whether the site is down. BrainGuard removes the element and leaves one grey line where it used to be, so you always know the difference between hidden and broken.
See where it works →- 26
switches across six services, every one off until you say otherwise
- 2
taps to put anything back — no timer, no streak
- 0
bytes that leave your phone — no network permission
Where it works
Tap a service to open its switches. The list is the app's list, in the app's order.
YouTube
7 switchesNever touched — search, subscriptions, playlists, history, and anything you open by link.
Instagram
5 switchesNever touched — DMs, search, your own posts, and any profile or post you visit directly.
LinkedIn
5 switchesNever touched — messages, jobs, search, invitations, company and profile pages.
X
4 switchesNever touched — following timeline, lists, search, bookmarks and DMs.
Reddit
3 switchesNever touched — your subscriptions, search, saved posts and comment threads.
TikTok
2 switchesNever touched — following, search, and any video opened from a shared link.
Who made it
Tom Ridley
Bristol, England
I wrote the first version for myself in September 2024, after opening YouTube to find out how to bleed a radiator and surfacing twenty minutes later with the radiator still cold. Fifty lines of CSS, hiding one shelf, leaving search alone on purpose.
I used it every day for a year and deleted the switches I never touched. Twenty-six survived. Eleven friends tried it in February; what stayed and what went came out of their complaints rather than my plans.
There are no investors, so there's no growth plan, no notification asking you to come back, and no reason for me to want your attention. It's free because it costs almost nothing to run, and the switches that are here now will stay free permanently. If I ever add a paid tier I'll say so here plainly, and it will be for sync or new services only — never for removing anything that's already free.
Privacy
There is nowhere for your browsing to go, because we never asked for anywhere to send it.
An extension that can read every page you visit should have to prove it isn't reading them. Assertions are cheap; missing permissions are not.
No network permission
The extension ships without one, so it cannot make a request. Verify it yourself in Settings.
Nothing leaves the phone
Your switches sit in a container on your device. No account, no sync, no crash reports, no analytics.
App Store label
Reads Data Not Collected — the one category that can't be worded around, because Apple checks it.
This website
No cookies, no analytics, no embedded third parties. Nothing to accept.
Download
Keep the sites. Lose the feed.
Free on the App Store, iOS 17 and later. Nothing to sign up for.