Google could kill YouTube Vanced for good

Wow, this article is just like 100% wrong. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet.

To get why this could be a problem for YouTube Vanced’s successors, we need to understand how they work. Rather than modding the YouTube app itself, Vanced apps are essentially tweaked and modded browsers that display videos via a WebView that shows YouTube, adding extra features to the experience like adblock and other YouTube Premium perks. If YouTube was able to check which apps or devices are trying to access its servers before displaying content, this would be an easy route to stop Vanced successors from working.

The YouTube-app, and Revanced in turn, does not utilize a WebView to display video. They are most certainly not 'modded browsers'.

Seriously, who wrote this shit? An AI? It's baffling.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Manuel Vonau • Senior Google Editor

(2251 Articles Published)
- Given that Revanced patches the YouTube app, Monsieur Vonau is most certainly wrong.
- Manuel Vonau
  
  From his bio on that site (https://www.androidpolice.com/author/manuel-vonau/):
  
  Manuel studied Media and Culture studies in Düsseldorf, finishing his university career with a master's thesis titled "The Aesthetics of Tech YouTube Channels: Production of Proximity and Authenticity." His background gives him a unique perspective on the ever-evolving world of technology and its implications on society. He isn't shy to dig into technical backgrounds and the nitty-gritty developer details, either.
  
  So he's a marketing guy with possibly zero tech background beyond watching YouTube videos, who isn't afraid to discuss "nitty-gritty developer details" despite apparently not actually understanding them.
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- I don't know any apps that work like that. I'm pretty sure even the YouTube is just an app
I'm surprised no one had mentioned this yet

It's because there's an annoying trend of everyone reading the headline and not the article. Drives me bonkers
- Headline: "THING IS HAPPENING"
  
  Body: "Here's 1000 words unrelated to the headline. Here's some ads. Here's interviews with three people saying nothing of interest. Here's the thing you clicked under the headline for and it adds a bit of nuance to the headline along with a bunch of waffling and uncertainty. Here's a pointless anecdote. More ads! Here's a recipe for chicken wings and a bunch of pictures of celebrities. Oops! Article ended a full screen ago. Nothing down here but clickbait and more ads."
  
  Gee, I wonder why people just take the headline at face value.
- There's no place like ~~home~~ Reddit.
  
  There's no place like ~~home~~ Reddit.
  
  There's no place like ~~home~~ Reddit.
How does it work under the hood? I remember googling around and never found out
- To play video, the YouTube app does API calls directly to the YouTube API instead of loading any web code, then gets a reference to the media to play back and plays it back in a native media playback SDK.
  
  Revanced does their stuff the way they do by manipulating the bytecode that the YouTube app consists of, to add/remove things.

It's a waste of time. People who bother installing Vanced are not likely to click a single god damn ad even if it's forced on them.

So yes, Google can choose to bother some people and get higher statistics on ad views, but the companies paying for the ad will not see one single fucking sale more. This lowers the value of the ad.

They're chasing imaginary revenue.

The value of exposure isn't real either. The phone might play it but I don't fucking watch something that I don't want to watch. I've been online since before online ads were a thing and not once have I bought anything from any online ads.

Just let me opt out of that circus for fuck sake.

I don't understand this toxic level of optimism found on this platform. if they do client integrity checks, nobody will be able to use an ad blocker. you will have to use an approved YouTube client. it will result in higher ad revenue to Google.

all of these folks who are using revanced will watch annoying ads repeating a thousand times over and the content of the ad will be stuck in their brains exactly as intended. the companies that pay for the ads don't care if you think you are immune to propaganda. they want you to watch.

what part of this is imaginary?
- companies that pay for the ads don't care if you think you are immune to propaganda. they want you to watch.
  
  They don't pay for ads just to waste my time. They buy ads to sell products.
  
  Forced advertising does not work on the kind of people who already do everything they can not to watch ads.
  
  if you think you are immune
  
  I'm literally not watching my phone if YouTube or other stream goes into ad mode. I do not see the ad.
  
  The imaginary part is that Google gets paid just as much for showing ads that don't work as they do for showing ads that do work.
  
  Forced advertising is good for Google. It's not good for the users nor the companies who pay Google.
- The majority of ads are toxic on a medical need level for me. I’d sooner build an ai to prewatch and live record videos. Cutting out the cursed segment.’
If you aren’t paying them for Premium, or viewing their ads, you’re literally costing them money. They’d rather stop you from even consuming the bandwidth.
- On the other hand, they are spending real money on development time to fight against an army of independents doing it for fun or personal satisfaction. That's throwing money into a hole they can never fill up
- Well, that part is working really well. I've been using YouTube less and less every time they've worsened the free service. I don't even bother with the revanced loopholes, I'll just don't use YouTube to find stuff. Most of the content is made for monetisation purposes anyway.
  
  I'm not saying they shouldn't do it, or that I don't understand why. It's just a prime example of the internet going to shit.
- If you give thumbs ups and add comments, you're still providing user generated content that increases the value of the content you watched, so they're still getting something out of it. Your contributions could go on to drive someone else to watch the video which could end up seeing the ad you blocked.
  
  It's a question of what that value is that you've provided to the service. It's the same question Reddit will be finding out the answers to over the next couple months.
- Does it really cost them? If we take it to the extreme and say everyone collectively decided to stop costing them money by watching their content for free, what would that do to the value of their platform?

No matter what, people will always find a way to mod the apps they really want to have free.

There's definitely a danger if attestation becomes widespread enough that they can require it.

Not a danger of being unable to mod the apps, but they will be able to restrict access to their servers to the official unmodified app, when it's running on specific trusted operating systems.
- This is already quite easy to do technologically, it's mostly a question of at what point Google feels it's worth doing, since once they start they have to commit to closing whatever exploits people find. And deal with the fallout of blocking a bunch of people on random old devices that weren't blocking ads anyway.
  
  Of course people can still work around by running modified apps on rooted devices but it'll be enough to defeat a probably fairly large slice of users too lazy to jump through hoops - and as a bonus it won't just block Revanced (which is a fair bit of work to get running already) but also the other apps for media players like Smarttube, which were easier for people to set up.
  
  And finally when all else fails they will spend the compute to embed the ads in the video stream, once they work out how to minimize the distribution costs for that.
Yup. I remeber the girls at school listening to bootlegged YouTube videos from shitty rip off apps from the appstore lol. Before revanced, there was vanced, after revanced, a new Phoenix will emerge. The people will it.
- Rerevanced
- I remeber the girls at school listening to bootlegged YouTube videos from shitty rip off apps from the appstore
  
  That could have been yesterday or like 15 years ago
I wouldn't be so sure. If you hang around for 10 years I would love to have a conversation after that length of time and see if you agree with yourself here

This is just the mini version of what they tried to do in Chrome. Since you don't have to use the built in webview it's meaningless.

Apps can easily be redesigned with some kind of webview integration, and some apps already do have random things that bring up webview, and thia would kill them on a rooted device.

The inherent issue here is they're arguing this will help prevent fraud, but they're not looking for fraud. They're looking for an altered device and assuming fraud.
- I nuked a food app recently because instead of opening so I could give them money in exchange for food they decided to police my phone for PCAPdroid by way of refusing to run beyond showing a message stating that I can't have PCAPdroid installed and closing after a 5 second timeout.
  
  Fuck you, Papa Murphy's. What's your app doing that you're afraid I'll be able to see? You're blacklisted for life now.
- What I meant though was you aren't necessarily stuck using Google's webview, though they make it non-trivial to jailbreak from theirs.
  
  https://github.com/bromite/bromite/wiki/Installing-SystemWebView

Of course they would, the bastards. I'm assuming that would also affect newpipe and freetube too?

At first I thought so too, but I believe those might still work as long as the attestation feature doesn't end up in browsers. Those applications likely can still pretend to be web user.

ReVanced is special because it patches original YouTube. So if the original YouTube would start doing this kind of verification, after being patched it would stop working. To fix it the whole playback code would have to be replaced, but at that point why not use NewPipe or GrayJay.

BTW: Google is doing that because it has monopoly in that market. They similarly have monoly with browser market. Still after uproar they backed off. We really should try to break it and apps that support multiple platforms (like mentioned NewPipe and GrayJay are probably the best way to dethrone them)
Consumers have created this future by flocking to YouTube and nothing else.

I'm making good use of yt-dlp while I still can

Surely as long as there's a way to access YouTube on devices without attestation, this won't kill anything.

Indeed. And if they decide to brick or degrade all legacy apps, people will just transcode and torrent.

Information wants to be free, and millions of people have the skills to make it happen.
- Alright, and Google doesn’t need to pay for that, so win win?

Can someone confirm whether YouTube ReVanced really uses WebView?

It's the official app apk with some mods. So probably not.
- In that case the premise of the entire article is wrong then.
I don't think it matters. ReVanced patches original YouTube so it will use whatever YouTube is using. Even if current YouTube app doesn't use WebView that's nothing stopping them from adding it in the future.

If I'm reading article right, Google supposedly "discontinued" the attestation technology in Chrome, because of the shit storm, but looks like they are thinking of adding it to Android and use it to verify the devices and applications are genuine. The YouTube server for example might refuse to serve the video if the application is not genuine.
- If they are testing application genuinity im more concerned they might break all the google services hacks etc used by graphene os.

I don't understand why YouTube doesn't use the stupid blob video format (I don't know the technical details, maybe it's about drm protection) already. It almost makes it impossible to view a video in something other than the player it came with and I don't like that.

Android WebView Media Integrity API

Is the WebView based on Chromium? If they add this WebView, how far off would it be from being added to Chromium?

The amount of copium I see in these comments is staggering. Google owns the Youtube app, they own the Youtube servers, they even own the damn operating system you're running it on, and they're one of the richest companies in history. Do you REALLY think they couldn't shut down ReVanced if they wanted to? Are you really that naive?

The moment they decide to put even a small amount of effort towards shutting down ReVanced or the others, they're as good as dead.

They've already tried to kill it like a year or two ago with their last major API changes. This is just another attempt at it.

Google may be wealthy, they may be in control. However, they're still limited by how the technology fundamentally works. You can only secure something so much before you inadvertently damage your own product's functionality by restricting its access too aggressively.

Another thing to remember, YouTube is used by literal billions of people across the entire planet from virtually every notable OS capable of doing so. Locking it down so that only one type of app and web browser can access it would cause them to lose millions of eyeballs and ears, i.e. hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue over time. It'd have the exact opposite effect of what they're trying to do (increase ad profits).
Technically they could, but the effort and checks required to do so would be massive and very disruptive to android in general. They tried something kinda like it with SafetyNet, and it's so trivial to bypass it's being phased out.
Turns out root detection is kinda easy to circumvent if you have, you know, root access.
The effort is so small that they decide not to?

Yes you know your stuff
The moment they decide to put even a small amount of effort towards shutting down ReVanced or the others, they’re as good as dead.

Possible. Now what it is missing is the part that should convince the ReVanced user to accept the new situation (they must bear the Ads) instead of stopping to use the service. Remember, Google if fighting against people that are already taking active actions against them, not the Average Joe user.

And in all this, Google cannot risk to put too many hops in the path of the Average Joe users as there is the risk that the common user consider that, all in all, the service no more worth the headache to use it.