If you are a YouTube Vanced fan or user, I have some bad news for you, the app will be shutting down in the coming days and no new update or version will be released for it in the future.
The developers of the YouTube Vanced app announced this evening via their official Twitter account that "the Vanced has been discontinued. In the coming days, the download links will be removed from the site".
YouTube Vanced is a modified YouTube app for Android devices that allows users to freely take advantage of many YouTube Premium features, such as hiding YouTube ads, running the app in the background, or playing videos in picture-in-picture mode. The app also allows users to bypass the video's intro and outro and allows even to bypass the sponsors' segments within YouTube videos.
Vanced also allows you to adjust many YouTube settings such as swiping to control the brightness or the volume, and it also contains some features that Google removed from the official YouTube ap such as the dislike count.
Due to all these features, many users resort to installing and using this mod instead of the official YouTube app, especially since Vanced also allows users to connect their Google account to the app to sync their subscribed channel list.
Modifying the YouTube application and providing it to users is certainly an explicit violation of the terms of use of the application, and deleting ads from it harms Google’s business, which generates important revenue from advertising, so it was only a matter of time for Google to take action against the Vanced application, and it seems that it has done so now, as the app developers confirmed on their channel in Telegram that the reason for shutting down Vanced are legal reasons.
On the other hand, the developers of the application announced that the currently installed versions of Vanced will remain operational for a period of up to two years, so it is assumed that this suspension will not affect the current users, at least for a while.
Lastly, and as an alternative to the YouTube Vanced app, you can either subscribe to the YouTube Premium service and use most of the features provided by this modified app legally, or you can use a free and open-source application such as New Pipe, which we have already talked about in a previous article.
