Silencing the Noise: How to Stop Video Autoplay in GOOGLE Discover on iOS

With our digital lives so tailored to the way we click, GOOGLE Discover’s personalised feed of news has become a shining beacon of hyper-personalisation, bringing us stories and content that we actually want to read based on what we’ve read before – and even what we’ve been Googling. Available on Android and on iOS through the GOOGLE app, it’s not only (usually) relevant but quite time-saving and entertaining. However, video autoplay can be a bit much sometimes. Here’s how to turn off video autoplay in GOOGLE Discover on the GOOGLE iOS app.

What Exactly is GOOGLE Discover?

By its nature, GOOGLE Discover is a personalised news feed – a conduit for news and content from across the internet, selected based on your search history and interests. For those surfing the digital day with an iPhone or iPad, getting to Discover means opening up the GOOGLE app to see a series of bespoke content – a feed reflecting back what GOOGLE thinks you are interested in. What you see when you customise GOOGLE Discover is what you care about.

GOOGLE's Gift to Your Digital Well-being: Control Over Video Previews

The feed that pops up in your GOOGLE Discover section is full of moving images – articles and YouTube videos that are constantly vying for your attention. Automatic playbacks further disrupt the browsing experience and, despite being made to make the service more engaging, your feed can quickly feel cluttered and intrusive. GOOGLE has a quick fix to offer for those who want to make their Feed a little quieter: it’s possible to turn off these video previews directly from the GOOGLE iOS app’s settings.

Mastering Your GOOGLE Discover Experience on iOS

Switching off GOOGLE Discover’s video autoplays on iOS is a fairly straightforward trip into the app settings for GOOGLE on your phone. Tap your profile icon, go to Settings > General, then scroll down for ‘Autoplay video previews’, and you have the ability to turn autoplays on, and tell the feature when you want your videos to autoplay: never, only on Wi-Fi, or always.

Beyond Autoplay: Personalizing Your GOOGLE Discover

Sure, muting video autoplay does a lot to improve the peaceful atmosphere of your browsing, but GOOGLE Discover has other alter egos to explore, too: you can tinker with your feed, fine-tune it to improve the match to your interests, or reset it to clear the slate altogether. Your feed is a living thing, changing with your consumption habits, which you can refine as you go.

GOOGLE Discover: Your Personalized Portal to the Web

But GOOGLE Discover is not merely a feature either: it is a personalised journey through the Web, of content that is, literally, hand-picked for you. Top stories about the issues and topics you have recently been interested in. Articles and videos about your (or your phone’s) hobbies, compiled into a personalised digest of the internet. If you did not like the clatter of autoplay videos, you can also shut them up to make your Discover feed a serene sanctuary of discovery.

The Power of GOOGLE: A Brief Overview

Its homescreen widgets and its vast empire of websites and apps are all meant to simplify, augment and tailor our experiences to ourselves. Today, we can adjust the settings on nearly any bit of digital technology to smooth our digital interactions, to wrap ourselves up in tech that can autoplay videos on our most-used tabs, or ensure we have more access to certain kinds of information than others.

In short, GOOGLE Discover on the iOS app is a powerful tool for surfacing relevant content, but it doesn’t need to be paired with the toll of invasive autoplay videos. If you want to get hands-on, you can customise your Discover tab and collaborate with GOOGLE to shape it to your taste. The technology is only as good as the designer – so better make sure it’s you.