Why we built talavo (and why iPhone YouTube is broken)

talavo started as a fix for our own phones. We’d open YouTube to watch one specific thing and resurface forty minutes later somewhere we never intended to go. That isn’t a willpower failure — it’s the product working exactly as designed. So we built the browser we wanted to use instead.

What’s actually broken

YouTube on iPhone is a stack of small frictions, each pulling for more of your attention:

• Ads before, during, and stacked back-to-back on longer videos.
• A Shorts feed wired directly into the home screen, engineered to be bottomless.
• Recommendation rails and autoplay that turn one video into a session.
• Comments positioned as the next thing to scroll into the moment a video ends.
• Background playback — letting audio continue with the screen off — locked behind a Premium subscription.

None of these are accidents. They’re the levers of an attention-maximizing product, and no amount of self-control reliably beats a system tuned by millions of experiments.

Why fix it at the browser

The cleanest place to intervene isn’t inside any one app — it’s the layer the content passes through on its way to you. A browser sees the page before you do, which means it can remove the entry points to the dopamine loops before they’re on screen: strip the ads, hide the Shorts shelf, collapse comments, mute recommendations, and keep video playing in the background like any decent media app should. Do it there and it works everywhere the same way, without trusting each site to behave.

What we believe

talavo is free, and the app collects no browsing data — there’s no talavo server that sees the URLs you visit. We’re a self-funded, two-person studio with no investors and no acquisition deck. The app is free on purpose: putting your attention behind a paywall would contradict the whole reason it exists. There’s an optional $0.99/month tier that removes a single launch ad and nothing else — every filter works identically either way.

If any of that resonates, talavo is on the App Store, and the longer story is on our about page.