As YT Vanced app offers pretty much everything you could wish for for a YouTube app, it is also truly hated by Google. YT Vanced removed all the video ads from the player, but also uses crowdsourcing to detect sponsored messages by YouTubers - and allows skipping those, too.
It also allows background playback, thus, making it a viable Spotify alternative in order to play music from YouTube on your phone, without forcing to keep the player visible.
And the list of enhancements YT Vanced offers over official YouTube app goes on and on: true dark mode, saving battery for OLED displays, better gestures, showing the dislike counts, etc etc.
As most of the YT Vanced's features blatantly violate Google's TOS for YouTube, the app has never been found from official Google Play store. Instead, you'd have to download the .apk directly from the developers' website.
But it seems that Google's long-reaching hand has finally gotten to the developers: YT Vanced announced on its official Twitter account that the project will be discontinued.
The download links will still work for a day or two, but they'll stop working soon, too. Developers reckon that the current YT Vanced app - if you have it installed - will work for another two years or so. Until Google does next major API change to the YouTube itself.
Vanced has been discontinued. In the coming days, the download links on the website will be taken down. We know this is not something you wanted to hear but it's something we need to do. Thank you all for supporting us over the years.
-- Vanced Official (@YTVanced) March 13, 2022
If you want to try it out, you can still download it through the official YT Vanced website.
Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 13 Mar 2022 16:35
