How to Turn Off Instagram Reels and Keep Everything Else
You don’t want to quit Instagram. You want one specific thing gone: the Reels tab, that little play-button in the navigation bar that you tap by accident and resurface from twenty minutes later. The DMs are fine. Your friends’ posts are fine. It’s the autoplaying, infinite, vertical-video hole you’d like to never see again.
Reasonable ask. Instagram, unfortunately, does not grant it.
What Instagram actually lets you do
Let’s be honest about the native options, because the internet is full of “settings hacks” that quietly don’t do what they claim.
Inside Instagram itself, you can do a few things to Reels — and none of them is an off switch:
- Mark individual Reels “not interested.” This nudges the recommendation engine, slowly and imperfectly. It does not remove Reels; it just shuffles which ones you get.
- Tap “manage” suggestions or take a break reminder on some surfaces. These are pacing prompts, not removal — the content stays, you’re just occasionally asked to consider stopping.
- Use built-in screen-time limits. These cap your total minutes and then show a dismissible wall. The Reels tab is still right there the whole time.
What you cannot do, anywhere in Instagram’s settings, is turn Reels off. There is no toggle that removes the tab, no preference that stops Reels from appearing in your feed, no permanent setting that makes the hole disappear. The tab is load-bearing for how Instagram wants you to spend time, so the company has no interest in letting you delete it. Anyone promising a hidden in-app switch is, gently, mistaken.
That leaves the usual fallback — delete the whole app — which throws away your DMs and your friends to get rid of one tab. (Why that backfires every time is its own story.) You wanted to remove a feature. Deleting removes the feature and everything attached to it.
How CherryBrew does it instead
CherryBrew is a separate app, not a setting inside Instagram. That distinction matters, so it’s worth being precise about how it works.
You don’t change anything in the Instagram app itself. Instead, you open Instagram through CherryBrew. CherryBrew loads the real Instagram — your real account, signed in as normal — but renders it with the algorithmic surfaces stripped out before they reach your screen. You’re looking at genuine Instagram. The Reels tab just isn’t on it.
Specifically, opening Instagram through CherryBrew removes:
- The Reels tab in the bottom navigation — the slot is gone, not just greyed out.
- Reels posts in your feed — the vertical-video posts that slip in between photos are filtered out.
- Explore — the discovery grid of algorithmically chosen strangers, which is the other main doorway into the same kind of hole.
Sponsored and “suggested for you” posts get cleared out in the same pass.
Because it isn’t a blocker, there’s no wall to dismiss and nothing to fight. The Reels tab is simply absent — and an absent tab takes no willpower to ignore.
The actual how-to
It’s about as simple as installing any app:
- Install CherryBrew from Google Play. (There’s a link at the bottom of this page.)
- Open Instagram from inside CherryBrew — it appears as one of the channels, alongside YouTube, Facebook, X, and Reddit.
- Sign in to your account the first time, exactly as you would in the normal app.
- Use Instagram like you always have — except there’s no Reels tab in the navigation, no Reels in your feed, and no Explore.
That’s the whole setup. There’s no parental-control maze, no DNS trick, no rooting your phone. You open Instagram through a different front door, and the room you walk into is the same room with the slot machine taken out.
What still works — all of it
The point of removing Reels is to keep the parts of Instagram you actually like. So those stay, untouched:
- Your DMs. Every message and group chat, exactly as before.
- Search. Look up any account or handle, any time.
- The people you follow. Their posts and stories are all still there.
- Your profile and posting. Share whatever you want, whenever you want.
You lose the Reels tab and Explore. You keep being a normal, reachable, posting Instagram user. That’s the trade — and for most people who came here wanting an “off switch for Reels,” it’s the trade they were actually after.
Why this beats white-knuckling it
If your plan is to keep the Reels tab and just not tap it, you already know how that ends — the tab is designed to be tapped, your thumb has muscle memory, and the feed behind it is engineered to keep you once you’re in. (The mechanics of why are in what doomscrolling does to your brain.) You can win that small battle most of the time. “Most of the time” is exactly the gap the tab is built to exploit.
Removing the tab outright closes the gap. There’s nothing to resist when there’s nothing to tap. You wanted Reels gone and everything else kept — that’s not a willpower problem to manage, it’s a feature to remove. So remove it, and keep the app you actually use.
If the Reels habit is part of a broader pattern — opening Instagram and losing thirty minutes when you meant to send one message — stopping doomscrolling without deleting the app covers the wider picture.