I am glad that it's gone.
Why?
Vanced has been discontinued
41–50 of 422 posts
Re: Vanced has been discontinued
#42There aren't many moments where I truly feel dismay at the end of something's lifecycle, but this definitely is one.
Vanced made mobile YouTube tolerable. I have NewPipe but it's not the same. Hopefully as the tweet says, it will stay functional for a while longer.
Re: Vanced has been discontinued
#43Surprised it took so long to be honest. It was so good and unlike with other youtube alternative clients, you basically had almost 1:1 feature parity over the official app. Plus you had the option to disable almost all the recent UI changes easily and a sponsorblock integration. It was much much more of a threat to Google than newpipe or less "normie" friendly alt clients, and it was getting too popular for it's own…
I was under the impression that Vanced was a cracked version of the official app. If that was the case then they deserve to be sued.
Vanced was indeed a cracked version of official YouTube app.
Re: Vanced has been discontinued
#44Would it be possible to use it if the source code is forked?
There isn't really a "source code" per-se for Vanced, they took the official YouTube app, decompiled it, applied hacks and recompiled it - pretty much very much the same way we hacked key checks and CD copy protections back in the day.
So if there's anything resembling source, it's more of a diff of a certain YouTube app version you can't just cleanly upload somewhere or even apply to new versions.
Re: Vanced has been discontinued
#45NewPipe [1] is an open-source alternative, although latest versions of Vanced will supposedly keep working for the foreseeable future [2]. [1]: https://newpipe.net/ [2]: https://nitter.net/YTVanced/status/1503055442506915846#m
I use NewPipe frequently. It's rumored that Vanced was sent a cease and desist (which seems pretty likely). Out of curiosity, what are the chances that NewPipe will face the same fate?
C&D is almost certainly what happened. The wording of the tweet makes that clear, as they aren't attributing it to something like someone leaving the team.
Re: Vanced has been discontinued
#46Re: Vanced has been discontinued
#47Surprised it took so long to be honest. It was so good and unlike with other youtube alternative clients, you basically had almost 1:1 feature parity over the official app. Plus you had the option to disable almost all the recent UI changes easily and a sponsorblock integration. It was much much more of a threat to Google than newpipe or less "normie" friendly alt clients, and it was getting too popular for it's own…
I'm surprised they did not have a plan for this. I thought Vanced would be based in a more "rebel" country like Russia, which is what Sci-Hub does. A Cease and Desist letter from Google would be meaningless there. Were they trying to pull this off in the USA, or other Western countries?
Re: Vanced has been discontinued
#48Would it be possible to use it if the source code is forked?
There isn't really a "source code" per-se for Vanced, they took the official YouTube app, decompiled it, applied hacks and recompiled it - pretty much very much the same way we hacked key checks and CD copy protections back in the day. So if there's anything resembling source, it's more of a diff of a certain YouTube app version you can't just cleanly upload somewhere or even apply to new versions.
But the source for the hacks could be made open, so that other people could work on it.
Re: Vanced has been discontinued
#49Surprised it took so long to be honest. It was so good and unlike with other youtube alternative clients, you basically had almost 1:1 feature parity over the official app. Plus you had the option to disable almost all the recent UI changes easily and a sponsorblock integration. It was much much more of a threat to Google than newpipe or less "normie" friendly alt clients, and it was getting too popular for it's own…
I'm surprised they did not have a plan for this. I thought Vanced would be based in a more "rebel" country like Russia, which is what Sci-Hub does. A Cease and Desist letter from Google would be meaningless there. Were they trying to pull this off in the USA, or other Western countries?
The number of people willing to put many months work into a project like this, with substantial legal risk, and no possibility of getting paid money, is very small.
And of that small set of people, the number who already live in Russia is even lower...
Re: Vanced has been discontinued
#50There aren't many moments where I truly feel dismay at the end of something's lifecycle, but this definitely is one. Vanced made mobile YouTube tolerable. I have NewPipe but it's not the same. Hopefully as the tweet says, it will stay functional for a while longer.
For me, it made YouTube so tolerable that I would spend significant amounts of time on it. Sometimes I get the feeling that a side effect of adblockers is that they unintentionally act as enablers for addicting platforms.
At times, it's worth thinking about what you're using adblock to accomplish at a higher level. For me it was subjecting myself to YouTube's recommendations for several more hours per day.
Luckily I had found an opportunity to quit YouTube stemming from unrelated reasons, and in the process I uninstalled Vanced. On desktop I block the recommendations feed in case I come from an external link, and I would say it has saved me significant amounts of time.
Also, this shutdown serves as a reminder of the future we may start to find ourselves living in when ads served from first-parties and technologies like DoH become ubiquitous. It's going to be far harder than using uBlock Origin to block ads when you start to need something beyond the DNS layer outside of the browser ecosystem.