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Aissen
nfriedly
It also restored the dislike button and added support for sponsorblock (which can automatically skip sponsor segments, as well as intros, outros, "like and subscribe" reminders, non-music sections of music videos, and other fluff.)
The name comes from it being an "advanced" YouTube app, only without any "ad"s ;)
Oh, and you could disable the comments section!
All-in-all, it just made YouTube a much better experience.
adamsmith143
>It also restored the dislike button
As a useless button to click? I would assume youtube removed the actual functionality in the backend so what's the point of the button?
judge2020
It uses an alternative backend where videos pre-removal had their dislike counters archived, and anything post-removal uses dislike data from users with the extension to crowdsource a likely dislike counter.
(in theory, if 5% of viewers of a video are people that have the extension, and only 10% of those viewers hit the dislike button, chances are that's a good sample size to assume that this video should have a 10% dislike ratio, but in practice it's probably a bit more complicated/weighted)
nfriedly
I think it used an alternate backend, possibly https://returnyoutubedislike.com/
RandallBrown
YouTube still has a dislike button. They just don't show you the number of dislikes anymore.
undefined
TheRealSteel
Oh wow, I just assumed it was made by a guy called Vance.
huseyinkeles
Bob Vance from Vance Refrigeration /s
alasano
I think my positive perception of self named software dates back to Irfanview.
I've been using it since 1998, never felt the need to change to anything else.
PragmaticPulp
> Apparently Vanced was a patched YouTube app
This is the part I missed in the original conversations.
If you redistribute a modified version of a company’s app, it’s going to be taken down. You can’t distribute another company’s work as your own.
The difference here appears to be that it’s a patcher, so they’re not distributing the proprietary app. Theoretically more robust against takedowns, but it also significantly limits the audience of who can go through all of the steps to do it.
I expect the real outcome is going to be a game of whack-a-mole as random people try to patch and distribute the app under different names. This isn’t actually a great situation because it sets an expectation among users that the app will always be changing names and distributors. Hackers love these situations because the door is now wide open for them to insert malicious code into a version and distribute it as the latest Revanced. Not good.
lewispollard
Vanced didn't redistribute a modified version of the Youtube app, they distributed a "manager" app which downloaded the official app's APKs and applied the patches at runtime. (edit: actually, I'm not 100% sure of that, since I've always used a rooted version which does apply patches at runtime, but I'm unsure about non-rooted.)
They were taken down for using a similar enough logo to Youtube that Google lawyered them into stopping that way, not for any kind of infringement in terms of software.
Mogzol
> They were taken down for using a similar enough logo to Youtube that Google lawyered them into stopping that way, not for any kind of infringement in terms of software.
Is there a source for this? Seems like they could have just changed the logo if that was the case, no?
mkdirp
> I expect the real outcome is going to be a game of whack-a-mole as random people try to patch and distribute the app under different names.
From their github org and an faq (I can't remember where I saw it), it seems they're planning on patching the YouTube app on your device, unlike what Vanced did.
And yes, it will be a game of whack-a-mole but since you can download individual versions of apps and only update when you want, I believe breakage will be quite limited.
hijinks
best part of vanced was the ability to background youtube so you can listen to music with the screen being locked
convery
BTW, Firefox on mobile lets you do that as well.
entropicdrifter
Firefox for Android also supports uBlock Origin
ChuckNorris89
New pipe will do that too. Or just watching the video in the phone browser.
Tenoke
It doesn't work in android chrome, I just tried. It does work in Firefox though.
izacus
Or you know, paying a few bucks for the music via Premium subscription.
zoover2020
NewPipe does this, too :)
Sakos
The most important part of Vanced is it allowed you to login to your account. NewPipe isn't an alternative to Vanced. It fills a completely different (more privacy-focused) niche.
lfkdev
apparently??? it was such an amazing app used by millions and by me every single day, i was devastated to hear it was discontinued
Aissen
To make it clear, personal opinion: this is piracy. Use yt-dlp, NewPipe, SmartTubeNext, invidious, VLC, whatever. Or pay for Premium.
But re-using a proprietary app and patching it is IMHO crossing the line.
judge2020
It's at least 'profiteering' off of the current state of YouTube, where anyone that uses an ad-blocking mechanism (desktop or mobile) is effectively being subsidized by the premium subscribers and mobile users without adblock.
2Gkashmiri
profiteering is earning. what are the devs of vanced earning?
lern_too_spel
If they're not distributing the patched application, I don't see why this is any worse than using an unauthorized YouTube client.
mdoms
They were distributing it.
nonbirithm
I have a feeling that any piece of closed-source software that becomes important enough will inevitably be reverse engineered by highly motivated people. This is doubly so for Vanced: The original team took pains to not release the source, but it merely took a few weeks for someone else to reverse engineer the reverse engineered codebase.
I've worked on preserving a few games with decompilers long after the original creators have moved on. Anecdotally, the death of Flash all but killed off a couple of assorted communities that didn't have enough motivation to hack the binaries themselves.
My guess is the only software that can perpetually maintain a community is software where the source code is available to be modified.
og_pixel
I don't know much about the topic so forgive my ignorance, but aren't Android apps written in Java/JVM language? Meaning decompilation should be really straightforward, I remember IntelliJ having a decompiler, many times I would accidental open a `class` file and it would suggest decompilation. This kind of code was still hard to read, but it was Java, not bytecode.
daveloyall
It's all relative, I'm sure, and I don't have any experience with decompilers other than this one: https://www.benf.org/other/cfr/, but, if you look at the change log there you will see that "really straightforward" is an unfortunately optimistic outlook. :)
kaba0
Nah, java can be decompiled really really well. To the point that basically every app uses obfuscation to make the resulting code harder to comprehend.
michaelmior
Generally it's not too hard to decompile. But whether the code is any way readable or easy to modify is another question.
bradleykingz
Android has ProGuard, which makes decompilation harder, but certainly not impossible if one is motivated enough.
UncleMeat
ProGuard does basic name minification and some code movement. It is easy to read proguarded bytecode if you have a bit of experience.
throwaway684936
There was literally no source code to release. YouTube Vance was a hex edited YouTube app binary.
infinityio
Looks like their patches repo is public - I wonder if that'll lead the the adblocking technique being patched out quickly by Google? Either way happy to see this app revived, even as a premium subscriber - it provides functionality that makes YouTube much nicer to use
idealmedtech
Interestingly, it's not the patches repo which contains the actual patches, it's the _integrations_ repo: https://github.com/ReVancedTeam/revanced-integrations/blob/m...
ushakov
i'm confident Google can't patch this without breaking their own app
d82nsjk9
why?
ajsnigrutin
(Re)Vanced is an app, dealing with googles backend.
They can either change the youtube app, to break Vanced, but this can be mitigated by not upgrading the youtube app, until there are patches for the new version,... or they can change the backend, thus breaking all the older youtube clients, making everyone upgrade their clients "now", which is a pain in the ass for many people.
gundamdoubleO
Is this somehow based on the original Vanced app (which wasn't open source afaik?) or are they essentially beginning from scratch?
Psychotherapist
The Re in ReVanced is for "Reverse Engineered" Vanced. ReVanced is going to be identical to the original Vanced, but later on (especially since it's open source) more patches/"plugins" will be available.
kakawait
At first is different because to avoid the same issue as Vanced, it will not ship you patched version of YouTube App but it will ship a patcher.
That mean you'll must have installed YouTube because it will be companion or patch (I'm not sure if it will patch the YouTube app or be a service next to YouTube to apply Vanced feature at runtime)
ushakov
don't know for sure, but since Vanced wasn't open-source, ReVanced possibly decompiled it and extracted the patches?
orliesaurus
I decided to be a translator for this project - that's the best contribution I can do as I know nothing about android - it seems like a good cause for the following reasons:
- I know of people who live in countries where YouTube Red isn't available, I pay for YouTube red myself and it's life changing. I want them to be able to experience this too in a way or another
- I feel like Google might have done the right thing in their eyes by forcing Vanced to shutdown, but I also think they didn't address the problem in its entirety. You can shut down 1 app - 10 more pop up. Maybe the strategy should be, introduce better features instead of taking them away and think about monetizing differently?
- I really can't stand Monday.com ads btw ;) they're everywhere even in my sleep.
MisterSandman
My guess is YouTube is well aware of the fact that new ones are going to pop up. I'm guessing they did the math and realized that YouTube Vanced became big enough that it was worth shutting down and removing it from the limelight while minimizing the Streisand Effect.
> Maybe the strategy should be, introduce better features instead of taking them away and think about monetizing differently?
As a Vanced user, I do agree that the app is objectively superior than the YouTube app. Customizable toolbars, better dark mode, disabling thumbnails auto-playing, more video control options etc. But 99.99% of people used Vanced to get rid of ads without paying, and that isn't something YouTube can compete against. No amount of "good features" would've caused people to abandon Vanced and switch to vanilla YouTube (well, unless they reduced or removed ads, which would be detrimental to their business and creators).
Every Vanced user should've known that this was a fight club situation, where if Vanced got big enough it would have to die.
LosWochosWeek
>No amount of "good features" would've caused people to abandon Vanced and switch to vanilla YouTube
Maybe for the majority of people, but surely I'm not the only one who would go back to Vanilla YouTube and pay for Premium if you could run Sponsorblock. I'm not paying 10 bucks a month to get rid of ads just to be bombarbed by "goofy" segways into mid-video commercials.
Sponsorblock - to me - is the killer feature of Vanced. It's crazy how much of a video is just stupid fluff that nobody has any use or need for.
xyzal
They should mirror somewhere outside of GitHub, this may get taken down.
3np
codeberg might be a good candidate. Slightly tangentially, to facilitate mobility and cross-server collaboration and repo syncing, Gitea (which they're built on) is getting federation in place
Wronnay
But after Codebergs Terms of Use, "Forks, migrations and testing repos are considered as inactive when they don't contain unique contributions and are inactive for more than a month. They shouldn't be kept for a prolonged amount of time, and thus might be removed after notifying maintainers and providing a 90 days period to ask for preservation."
Also "You are legally responsible for your edits and contributions on the platform, so for your own protection you should exercise caution and avoid contributing any content that may result in criminal or civil liability under any applicable laws (e.g. copyright and patent infringements, but also things like age-restricted content without age confirmation). Both the German legislation and the legislation in your country of residence may be relevant here."
Codeberg is a registered organization and also has to act on copyright infringements...
3np
Legal part: Very good point - I would have assumed from a first look-through of the repos that it's legally clear but IANAL nor German so it should be taken into consideration when choosing where to host.
Activity part: Given the popularity of the project and Codeberg seeming to be quite approachable, I would assume it would not be an issue.
And, a major point of federation is to facilitate a more traditional and decentralized workflow where a takedown at a single host is not too disruptive for the project.
blibble
not sure MS will be too concerned about Google losing ad revenue
hundchenkatze
Maybe not, but MS does follow the DMCA takedown process.
> "If the notice alleges that the entire contents of a repository infringe, or a package infringes, we will skip to Step 6 and disable the entire repository or package expeditiously." [0]
This is what was going on with some Grand Theft Auto mods[1] and youtube-dl [2]
[0] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/content-removal-polic...
[1] https://www.thegamer.com/taketwo-dmca-takedowns-gta-mods/
[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/youtube-dl-re...
judge2020
So does everyone else. Only self-hosted gives you the ability to ignore DMCA takedowns because the same entity is taking liability for either not following a dmca or performing the actual copyright infringement.
chii
> MS does follow the DMCA takedown process.
which would be bad if the repo had any copyrighted materials. But does it?
blibble
you're not thinking like a bureaucrat
they can do it exceptionally slowly and specifically
toomuchtodo
Zip it and host it as a torrent with a magnet link?
noname120
(Original) Vanced source code: https://github.com/fdciabdul/Vanced-Backup/tree/master/sourc...
brink
I wouldn't be so resistant to paying Youtube if they weren't so trigger happy with censorship.
renewiltord
In general, this is my position to most paying things. There's always some legitimate reason for me to not pay for anything. Honestly, I've done it all my life. I never paid for a single college textbook, for instance. If more people would make paid things that weren't also evil, then maybe they could have my money.
The interesting thing is that the more money you have, the easier this becomes. For instance, with low cash flow, you can't afford an occasional $86 SF parking ticket. But with high cash flow, you can do the math and know that if you can escape every 3 days downtown, you come out ahead just paying the ticket.
laci37
Same thing here. I'm happy to pay for Nebula. But I don't want to pay to a platform that is constantly criticized by all the creators publishing there.
wintermutestwin
I wouldn't be so resistant to paying YouTube if they weren't stealing my data.
xanaxagoras
Same. I was happy to pay for it a couple of years ago, but I recently cancelled a pretty long running premium subscription.
If they're not outright removing videos from people I subscribe to, or outright removing people entirely, they're creating an atmosphere where those who remain rigorously self-censor to preserve their clout and income streams. Most of the content that's left is uninteresting because it's too risky to discuss anything controversial, let alone express a controversial opinion. RIP.
LordDragonfang
I have plenty of very interesting stuff on my feed too. Even discussions of "controversial" topics. Other than bad-faith DMCA claims, I rarely see videos get taken down. Which leads me to wonder what type of content you're subscribing to.
Most of the time when I see complaints of "censorship" or "controversial" topics, it's a dog whistle for a very specific kind of speech.
xanaxagoras
Sorry, what exactly are you insinuating?
timdaub
Youtube's frequency of ads has become so extreme that I've just yesterday opted to pay 11€/month for YT Premium.
I had tried before disabling them with a Pihole or by blocking domains. It didn't work. Also, on a Samsung TV, you can't really install another front end.
omginternets
This is cable tv all over again. Pretty soon there will be ads on paid YouTube subscriptions too, mark my words.
emsy
There are: “now for a quick word about this week’s sponsor”
dspillett
There is a difference there in that the sponsorship money all goes to the content creator, rather than to YT who may or may not (at their whim) share a small portion with whoever posted the video (which is far from always the content creator).
They also aren't stalking you around everything you do on the Internet in the name of targetting.
folkrav
I mean, that's on content creators doing live reads, and YT has nothing to do with it.
cercatrova
SponsorBlock fixes this
folkrav
I wouldn't be surprised, but it's also the moment I stop paying for YT Premium.
matheusmoreira
No doubt. YouTube premium customers are just providing disposable income data to advertisers. They've segmented the market, it's only a matter of time before some manager looks at how much more valuable the premium group is and decides to show ads to them too because doing otherwise is leaving money on the table.
rmellow
1. Get an Android TV device. This is not actually a TV, but a device that connects to your TV via HDMI. Prices vary, but it's not expensive.
2. Install SmartTubeNext on the Android TV. Now you have something better than YouTube Premium: This app supports SponsorBlock, which not only gets rid of YT ads, it also skips filler segments, self-promotion segments and sponsor segments.
3. You can also install a SponsorBlock browser extension.
Both of these are Open Source Software.
aembleton
You can also install SmartTubeNext on a Firestick.
malermeister
Which is running a fork of Android TV afaik
ulzeraj
I have a Sharp TV on my living room and the YT app crashes everytime a certain type of ad is played after the video starts. I don't know if its the video codec or if the TV is having a hard time going back to the original video. Out of nowhere a 5 second chocolate or cheese ad plays and the TV OS completely crashes.
Tried attaching an ARM SBC with Librelec but the state of the Youtube apps are extremely broken in a way that you need api keys from a google cloud account and that allows you to only play videos. Your subscriptions and everything are not imported. PS4 runs fine but I don't want to run a 100W console to watch YT videos.
Meanwhile I've found out that most of my favorite channels (mostly tech and retro stuff) are also uploading to Odyssey as a sort of backup strategy. That works very well for me.
aembleton
Get an Amazon Firestick and install SmartTubeNext on to it. The Firestick plugs into your HDMI so your TV doesn't need to do any extra processing.
ajot
Can your SBC run Android (or even better, LineageOS)? If so, you can install Kodi for Android and launch Youtube or Newpipe within Kodi.
ulzeraj
It is a RockPro64. The stock image offered by Pine is borderline useless barebones without the store. Some complicated process involving connecting an usb-c cable and running ADB from Android SDK is necessary.
I also tried some Android distribution called Slash TV which seems to be kinda complete but the videos keep defaulting to 480p even after I set my preferences to high quality. It seems Slash TV is a one man's project and it hasn't received an upgrade in a while.
I was surprised how much of a nice product Librelec is but all the YT apps for Kodi (Youtube, Tubed) are in this broken state due to some API changes.
yjftsjthsd-h
Would a Chromecast cover your use case?
ulzeraj
Maybe but if the solution is throwing more money into hardware I'd rather get something like an Apple TV or Nvidia Shield.
nicoco
I don't youtube that much but ublock+firefox and newpipe have been efficient for me.
Edit: overlooked your comment and did not see you mentioned a smart TV.
pbasista
With TVs it is especially important to look at the _software_ it comes with. If it is some locked-down piece which requires the blessing of the manufacturer to install anything on it, then I would stay away from such TVs.
It seems to me that Android TVs offer at least some degree of customization because it is possible to install apps there. But the value you get from them depends on whether you can get the root access and on other restrictions the manufacturer has imposed on it. So, in general it is not an ideal usage model.
In my opinion, a pure Linux TVs would be much better. For instance, running Kodi as a frontend with TVHeadend or minisatip as a backend. They would of course have plenty of possibilities to play other media and would be fully customizable, giving the customer a _choice_ to consider and utilize that capability. In my opinion, there is a reasonably sized market for such TVs.
shultays
Android has smarttube app which is even better (imho) compared to official youtube app, even if you pay for adfree
For starters, it supports sponsorblock which is even more adblocking. Secondly i think ux is miles better
You dont need root but you need to manually download and install it
henriquecm8
That's really nice, I need to save this for when I buy an android tv
dsr_
The answer is to grab a Pi or similar tiny box and treat the TV as a dumb monitor.
This works very well.
dessant
Host based content blockers have no future. Ad companies have been moving to first-party ad delivery in the past few years, and YouTube serves ads and videos from the same host.
Edit: nevermind, I've completely misread your comment to be about Pi-hole :)
shultays
Are there remotes for Pi? How do you control it? What tv like OS do you use?
Can it also turn on/off tv? I think HDMI allows that but not sure if Pi can do that
fbnlsr
I'm in the same boat. On desktop it's pretty easy to work around ads thanks to uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock. But on an Android TV it's becoming unbearable. It's like Youtube has come to torture and extortion to get our money so we can get a little bit of peace of mind.
okkdev
This is a godsend for Android TVs: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext
wintermutestwin
You do realize that you are paying more than 11/month right? Google is also stealing your data. I don't know how you value yours, but mine is priceless.
hohoemi8
What did Google expect? If they take this one down another will appear to take its place, and so on.
Chirael
When you essentially have a monopoly position, and most of your product updates are to improve your own revenue and not to make the customer experience better because you simply don’t have to do that anymore, eventually people will try to revolt and create alternatives. Because of the network effect lock-in, this kind of creativity (patching the existing monopolist’s app rather than creating a whole new service) is one of the more accessible methods of trying to improve the product. I’m not making a judgment on whether or not it is right, but from a purely providing-the-best-product-to-the-user perspective, I am happy to see alternatives flourish.
sofixa
There are already alternatives out there (like New Pipe). Vanced was taken down because they tried to monetise it via an NFT which crossed a line.
throwxxxaway
Could anyone who is familiar with Java/Kotlin/Android explain how does this work?
I tried decompiling YouTube App on Android to remove the ads some time ago, but I failed to compile it back because some kind of security thing did not allow the app to start.
Psychotherapist
Although I am not really familiar with Android Development, I got it to work like this:
- decompile using apktool
- make changes
- recompile apk using apktool
- zipalign apk
- sign apk (using the apksigner.jar) with a certificate
Tools like uber-apk-signer really help to do the last three steps
mach1ne
At least they didn't make the copyright mistakes this time. Perhaps it would be better if this version of Vanced stayed difficult to install to avoid spreading it too wide.
gruez
>At least they didn't make the copyright mistakes this time
more like, trademark mistakes. Patching and redistributing a proprietary app most definitely violates copyrights.
lb_
> redistributing a proprietary app
Revanced patches the locally installed version, so hopefully that means they'll be in the clear
l-lousy
Google didn’t do anything until Vanced tried to release an NFT and profit off the app
LosWochosWeek
How can people actually believe that? Sure, a 'deleted-an-hour-after-posting' tweet is what made Google muster up all their lawyers to take down an app that millions used to circumvent paying for YouTube Premium and/or watch ads.
It was a stupid coincident. Google would've killed Vanced sooner or later.
moondev
> Not affiliated with Vanced team.
I wonder if the original "vanced" can now file a dispute over this project's name?
mminer237
Theoretically they could sue for trademark infringements, but:
1. ReVanced has a disclaimer that they're not affiliated, which helps make sure people aren't confused.
2. The Vanced people probably are glad someone's continuing their efforts after they're no longer able to.
3. Vanced has been discontinued and taken down, so it's no longer "used in commerce", so I think the common law trademark should cease to exist.
LosWochosWeek
> sue for trademark infringements
Yeah, maybe at the piracy trademark comission on pirate island... For obvious reasons Vanced had no trademark on anything and thus can't sue for trademark infringements.
They could possibly sue for a copyright infringement, but for that they'd have to prove that they do in fact hold a copyright on whatever they're suing for. They'd have to prove that (whatever) indeed is either (a) an original work that's protected under copyright or (b) it's a derivative work that's protected under copyright.
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Apparently Vanced was a patched YouTube app for Android, removing ads, adding a dark theme and YouTube Premium features (probably more ?). It was discontinued two weeks ago:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/13/22975890/youtube-vanced-a...