noreel

Patch your own Instagram for Android so Reels stop being an endless scroll — not hidden behind willpower, but enforced by the app itself. Out of the box everything is allowed; you decide what to turn off in a Reels settings page, and you can lock those settings for good.

Everything else (feed photos, stories, DMs, search, profile) keeps working.

Reference version: Instagram 451.0.0.45.80 (arm64, Android 16 / HyperOS). Other versions may need the patterns in patch.py adjusted.

Settings

Settings and activity → How you use Instagram → Reels: a full‑screen page with Instagram‑style switches and multiple‑choice boxes. Everything is enabled by default (shown below with every option on and every box expanded).

Setting	What it controls
Reels tab: for you (switch + box)	For you mode of the Reels tab. Options: people I follow, people who follow me, others, me, ads. Switch off = permanent STOP in that mode.
Reels tab: following (switch + box)	Following mode (reels from accounts you follow). Options: following, ads.
Reels tab: friends (switch + box)	Friends mode (reels your friends interacted with). Options: friends, ads.
Posts: for you (box)	Reels (every video is a reel now) and ads in the home feed (For you and Favorites). Options: people I follow, people who follow me, others, me, ads.
Posts: following (box)	Reels and ads in the Following home feed. Options: following, ads.
AI‑generated content (switch + box)	Any post that Instagram marks as AI (the AI info label, C2PA metadata or self‑disclosure), reel or photo. Applies everywhere, on top of every other setting. Options: people I follow, people who follow me, others, me, ads.
Reels in search	Explore (magnifier) grid and search results.
Reels sent to you / you send in DMs	Reels in chats (preview and viewer).
Reels you post	Your own profile (grid and Reels tab).
My reposts / Saved reels	Your reposts tab and Saved (grid and All posts list).
Reels on other profiles / Reposts on other profiles	Other people's profiles (grid, Reels tab, reposts tab, All posts list).
Burn the boats	After a warning and a 10 s countdown, the Reels page disappears from the menu and the current settings stay as they are. Only clearing Instagram's cache or data, or reinstalling, brings it back.

Features

No way to escape, by design. Allowing something never opens the door to the endless feed:

• Reels opened from a DM (received or sent), or from a post in the home feed, play one at a time: swiping to another reel shows STOP and closes the viewer, even with everything enabled. A shared reel never becomes a way into the general feed.
• Saved reels, reposts, your reels and other profiles' reels only show exactly that content: their viewer can be scrolled, but it only contains those reels.
• The Reels tab always shows its For you / Friends header, so you always know (and choose) which mode you are in, and each mode follows its own box.

Reels tab

• Reels that are not allowed are filtered out of the list before they reach the viewer. If one still shows up (e.g. from Instagram's cache), the viewer skips it automatically; after 10 blocked reels in a row the mode closes with a permanent STOP (no scrolling). Anything that shows up blocked is covered with STOP and muted.
• A mode that is switched off, or has no option checked, is a permanent STOP: no scrolling, nothing plays, but the header still lets you switch mode.

Home feeds (For you, Following, Favorites)

• Every video is a reel now; photos are not. Posts you keep allowed stay untouched.
• Ads you don't want are filtered out, reel or photo alike (if you don't want ads as reels, you don't want them as photos either), including multi‑ad blocks — no blank gap is left.
• Any other reel that is not allowed is covered with the STOP screen at its own size (16:9 included), muted, and tapping it shows the full STOP screen. Your own post right after uploading is covered too (the upload progress row is not).

Everywhere else (Explore, search, saved, profiles, reposts, DMs)

• Items that are not allowed are covered with the STOP screen in place; opening them shows the full‑screen STOP screen in your phone's language, with a Go back button. In Explore and in reposts tabs everything opens in the reels viewer, so every item is covered.
• Long‑pressing a covered item does nothing (it would otherwise preview it).
• Screens that are none of the above (e.g. who viewed your story) are never covered.

AI‑generated content works like ads: reel or photo, the post is blocked. It is detected only when Instagram marks it (label, C2PA metadata or self‑disclosure); unmarked posts cannot be told apart. A single photo of a carousel cannot be blocked on its own, because Instagram marks the whole post.

The Reels tab with everything blocked

This repo contains only scripts and patch code. It does not ship any Instagram APK. You extract the APK from your own phone and patch it locally.

Why

App blockers (screen‑time apps, NFC "brick" style blockers) rely on Android's accessibility / usage‑access services. On some ROMs (e.g. Xiaomi HyperOS) those only work while the blocker is allowed to auto‑start, and turning that off is enough to open the blocked app again. Removing the feature from the app itself has no off switch.

How it works

Instagram's code is obfuscated with redex and class names change every release, so patch.py locates its targets by structure and by the __redex_internal_original_name fields redex leaves behind:

Target	Patch
IgTab tab list	CLIPS kept (its content is filtered); optionally removes SEARCH
Feed item JSON parser	drops clips_netego / vibes_in_feed_unit units; media_or_ad items go through Gate.keepFeedReel (ads filtered per settings)
ClipsFragmentFactory	the viewer/tab creation asks Gate (by ClipsViewerConfig source); otherwise BlockedFragment
Fragment‑by‑name factory used by ModalActivity	same, for reels opened from DMs / notifications
Clips viewer data controller	new items filtered by Gate.filterClips (Reels tab)
Generic RecyclerView adapter / bindViewHolder / chat message binders	Gate.bound*: covers items that are not allowed
ContextualFeed adapter	Gate.filterFeed (Following / Favorites / Saved lists)
Fragment.performCreate / performResume	Gate tracks the current screen (feed mode, single‑reel viewers)
Settings (settings2) definitions and navigator	the REELS_SECOND row becomes the Reels page
Media / User getters (author, follow status, injected, AI label/detection, carousel)	read by Gate (by reflection, names filled in by patch.py) to classify each item

The logic lives in plain Java (java/src: Gate, Settings, BlockScreen) compiled to smali; smali/com/igsinreels/Blocker.smali and BlockedFragment.smali hold the few calls that need obfuscated names, which patch.py fills in.

Only base.apk is modified (about a dozen of its dex files). It is then merged with the unmodified splits into a single APK (APKEditor) and signed, so it installs with a plain adb install or by tapping the file on the phone. The STOP screen is plain Java (java/src) compiled to smali.

Reverse engineering with REA

The analysis was done by an AI agent (Claude Code) using REA, an MCP server / CLI for reverse engineering binaries and apps. For Android, REA wraps a headless JADX engine and returns evidence-backed results (APK SHA-256, engine version, raw output).

REA was used to load the 240 MB base.apk (~183k classes) and search its classes without the source code (inspect-android-class/-method can then decompile a given class or method):

export REA_JADX_MCP_JAR=/path/jadx-headless-mcp-0.7.1-all.jar
npx -y rea-agents search-android-classes /path/base.apk ClipsTab --json

Since almost every class is obfuscated (X.09Vp, X.04WZ...), name search only finds a few classes. The actual targets were found by combining that with baksmali, grep over the smali for strings ("CLIPS", "clips_netego", "media_or_ad") and redex's original class names, plus adb logcat stack traces (e.g. a temporary log in the ClipsViewerFragment constructor showed exactly which factory created it). patch.py turns those findings into structural patterns, so the same script works on 451.0.0.0.75 and 451.0.0.20.80 (the second one only needed one regex to be generalized).

Usage

Requirements: Linux/macOS, Java 17+, Python 3.10+, adb, a phone with USB debugging (on Xiaomi also enable Install via USB).

./setup-tools.sh                    # smali, baksmali, uber-apk-signer, APKEditor -> tools/
./pull.sh                           # pulls base.apk + splits -> apks/<version>/
./build.sh apks/<version>           # patches, merges, signs -> out/<version>/instagram-noreel-<version>.apk
adb uninstall com.instagram.android # first time only (different signature)
./install.sh out/<version>

build.sh creates a signing key in keystore/ on first run. Back it up: updates installed with the same key keep your login; a new key means uninstalling again.

To also remove Explore (the search tab): IGSR_REMOVED_TABS=CLIPS,SEARCH ./build.sh apks/<version>.

Rebuild the Java part after editing java/src: ./java/build.sh (needs the Android SDK, platform 34).

Tested on Instagram 451.0.0.0.75 and 451.0.0.45.80 (arm64, Android 16 / HyperOS).

Known issues

• No Play Store updates: repeat pull → build → install for each new version.
• Meta's preinstalled Facebook Services rejects the re‑signed app and may show a crash dialog (used for the in‑app browser). Removing it for your user fixes it: adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.facebook.services (restore: adb shell cmd package install-existing com.facebook.services).

Disclaimer

Not affiliated with Meta or Instagram. Modifying the app may break Instagram's Terms of Use; use at your own risk, on your own account and device.

License

MIT