Sanyi Diriba is sixteen, which means he grew up swiping. YouTube Shorts arrived when he was in middle school. TikTok became ubiquitous around the same time. The dopamine loop of short-form video isn't something he read about in a psychology journal—it's the ambient condition of his adolescence.
So maybe it makes sense that he's trying to build a way out.
YScroll, his app and browser extension, does what the name suggests: it helps people stop scrolling. Set a daily limit on YouTube Shorts or TikTok. Watch the timer count down. When it hits zero, the app blocks access. Optional cooldown periods add friction if you're tempted to jump back in. It's hardly revolutionary—plenty of digital wellness tools do roughly the same thing. What makes Diriba's version notable, at least so far, is that people are actually using it.
The Chrome extension went live in late December 2025 or early January 2026. Within four days, according to a LinkedIn post Diriba published, it had pulled in 800 installs. That's a respectable debut for an indie project with no marketing budget. As of early April 2026, the Chrome Web Store showed approximately 275 active users and a 4.9-star rating based on ten reviews—modest numbers, sure, but consistent enough to suggest the thing works.
The Android version arrived more recently, distributed as an APK file through third-party platforms like APKPure rather than the Google Play Store. Version 1.0.0 was last updated on March 29, and install figures for the mobile app haven't been made public.
The Mechanics of Restraint
YScroll's design philosophy leans minimal. Users pick a cap—either daily or per-session—for how long they want to spend on short-form feeds. The app enforces it. When time runs out, access gets blocked or redirected. Cooldown timers can be layered on top, creating a buffer before the next session begins.
On Android, the app relies on the Accessibility Service to detect when someone is watching YouTube Shorts or TikTok. According to the APKPure listing, all tracking happens locally; no personal data leaves the device. The Chrome extension follows a parallel approach, monitoring time spent on Shorts, Instagram Reels, and similar feeds, then locking things down once limits are reached.
Diriba has described YScroll as open source, though no public repository link can be found or verified as of April 2026. The domain, yscroll.xyz, was registered on December 14 under his name—a detail that tells you how recently this all came together.
An Awfully Crowded Room
Digital wellness apps designed to curb short-form video addiction are everywhere now. Scroll Break. Scrollless. BlockScroll. StopScroll. NoScroll. The names blur together, which is part of the problem. Some work cross-platform. Others focus exclusively on iOS or Android. Nearly all of them use accessibility services or browser extensions to enforce boundaries—the same toolkit Diriba is working with.
And here's the wrinkle: YouTube itself rolled out a built-in Shorts timer last October. The feature lets users set reminders to pause their scrolling. By early this year, supervised teen accounts started getting hard caps. When the platform you're trying to limit starts limiting itself, the value proposition for third-party tools gets squeezed.
Still, the timing isn't entirely unfavorable. Media and policy conversations around "addictive design" continue to gain intensity. A report published in March by Bits of Freedom examined infinite scroll and autoplay as deliberate mechanisms engineered to maximize engagement. Lawmakers in multiple countries are circling the issue. The question of whether platforms should be responsible for the behavior they incentivize isn't settled—which means there's still room for alternative solutions, even redundant ones.
The Build-in-Public Playbook
Diriba's age gives YScroll an underdog narrative that the indie maker community loves. His LinkedIn announcement of the Chrome extension racked up more than 3,000 reactions—remarkable reach for a first-time builder with no institutional backing. A teaser post on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) opened with the line "I'm 16 and just finished building an app to stop endless scrolling." It generated significant replies and shares, the kind of social proof that can matter more than download counts in the early days of a project.
The Android app, though, has distribution challenges that feel harder to solve. Without a presence on Google Play, discoverability is limited. APK sideloading appeals to a specific type of user—one comfortable with manual installs and willing to bypass official app stores. That's a narrow slice of the potential audience. No public install metrics have emerged for the mobile version, unlike the early Chrome numbers Diriba shared.
There's also the matter of trust signals. Third-party security scanners have flagged yscroll.xyz with mixed assessments. Gridinsoft labeled the domain "suspicious" in late February, citing its recent registration and some blacklist flags, while Scamadviser gave it an average-to-good rating. These automated tools often contradict each other, especially on new projects, and they shouldn't necessarily be taken as gospel. But they're part of the landscape anyone launching a standalone app has to navigate.
What Sticks?
YScroll's early traction on the browser side suggests demand exists for independent alternatives to platform-level controls—even when those controls now exist. Whether that translates into sustained growth, and whether the Android app finds its footing outside APK distribution hubs, remains an open question.
The digital wellness space tends to reward simplicity. Tools that overpromise or add too many features often collapse under their own complexity. YScroll's pitch is clean: set a limit, enforce it, get on with your day. In a market where platforms are finally adding their own guardrails—perhaps more reluctantly than users might hope—that clarity could be enough to carve out a foothold.
Or it might not. Building software is one thing; building a sustainable product that outlasts the initial burst of attention is another. Either way, this is a real tool solving a real problem, assembled by someone who won't graduate high school for another year. That counts for something.
