YouTube Vanced

» see vanced.app as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Vanced's entire life fits inside a stretch when i had an Android phone in my pocket every day and wrote software for a living, and it still went past me at a distance. installing it meant switching off the one setting Android spends all its energy telling you never to switch off. some people find that trivial and some people find it unthinkable, and which one you are turns out to be most of the story.

it started on 21 February 2017 as something called iYTBP, posted to the XDA Developers forums by a user going by Master_T. the initials stood for injected YouTube background playback, which tells you the original complaint. Google had built a video app that stopped playing the moment you locked the phone, and would sell you the fix for a monthly fee. somebody patched the app instead.

what grew out of that patch became a full parallel YouTube client. no advertisements at all, playback that continued with the screen off, picture in picture on phones that were not supposed to have it, an all black theme for OLED panels, and later a built in version of SponsorBlock that skipped the read-out sponsorships inside the videos themselves. none of it was in the Play Store. all of it was an APK you found on a website and installed yourself.

the piece that made it usable rather than merely clever was MicroG. signing into a Google account inside a modified app normally required root access, which most people were never going to do. Vanced shipped a companion that faked just enough of Google's services to let you log in with a normal phone, so your subscriptions and your history came with you. that is the detail that took it from a forum project to something ordinary people passed around at work.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

Vanced was not a separate video service. it was Google's own app with pieces rewritten, which is why it looked and behaved exactly like YouTube while doing things YouTube would not. the team rebuilt it against each new official release, so every few weeks there was a fresh version to install over the old one, by hand, from the same website.

that manual update loop was the friction, and on 30 June 2020 they shipped Vanced Manager to remove it. one small app that fetched the current build, installed MicroG alongside it and kept both current. it made the whole thing feel like a product rather than a download, which is roughly the moment Vanced stopped looking like a hobby and started looking like a competitor.

~ the day it died ~

on 13 March 2022 the team announced they were done. Google had sent a cease and desist. the demands were about the name and the mark rather than the code, which is telling: remove every reference to YouTube and change the logo. no lawsuit was filed and no judge ever looked at any of it. a letter arrived at a group of anonymous volunteers and the project ended that week.

the download links came down over the following days. what stayed up, for a while, was every copy already installed, and that is the part people misread at the time. Vanced did not switch off on 13 March. it simply stopped being maintained, and an app built by patching somebody else's app has a shelf life measured by how long that somebody leaves the seams where they are.

~ the long tail ~

the decay took two more years. core playback broke in late April 2023 when the API underneath finally moved far enough. Vanced MicroG was disabled in late March 2024, which took the account login with it. by then the last build people were running was a version of YouTube from early 2022, still ad free, increasingly unable to play anything.

ReVanced picked it up, built by people out of the same orbit, and solved the legal problem by not distributing an app at all. it ships a patcher instead, and you point it at your own copy of YouTube. that is a real answer to a cease and desist about a name and a logo, and it has kept working. vanced.app is a parked page offering the domain for sale. a separate site at vancedapp.com still serves a page with the old name on it, run by somebody with no connection to the people who wrote any of this.

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