Google could kill YouTube Vanced for good::The company is exploring an integrity API that could lock down WebViews with DRM
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)
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.
To be fair, you can be a developer maintaining a website or an app for a company that operates on stuff you have no idea about. Working for a hospital doesn’t mean you can perform surgery.
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.
The recipe thing… OMG lol…
Peanut butter and jelly recipe:
My family had a farm and my mother loved to run around with the chickens. We would play kick the neighbors dog all summer while the crows chased my father around. Donkey season can be a wonderful time when the leaves just start to turn and the beavers come home for winter. Three times in my life have I encountered such joy, one was when I had my first hit-and-run, the second was when I learned how to make napalm, and finally the last joy was in writing such absolute nonsense that just wont ever end when all you wanted was a goodamn simple fucking list of ingredients and maybe a temperature to cook at. Well the seasons change and I still waffle on, maybe one day you’ll get your recipe, but you won’t find it here. Or will you? Turn to page 36 for recipe, turn to page 4 to continue down this path into madness with me.
Recipe: Peanut butter. Jelly. Bread.
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.
That’s not true. Do you think, say, coca cola cares if you click on ads? Not all ads are looking for clicks. Some just want to get impressions.
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.
I’m not disagreeing you, just stating the facts. If we aren’t paying for it, and not watching their ads, we can’t expect to be considered at all. I paid for Premium for a few months, just canceled it while I catch up on some other things. We still have the freedom to pick and choose which services we pay for which is fine by me.
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?
Yes, Bandwidth, servers, storage are all expensive. If everyone stopped paying or seeing ads they’d kill the product and you’d have nothing. There is no viable replacement for YouTube. Most channels would cease to exist. Only the larger ones would be able to afford to figure out how to keep going. The ladder would be pulled up for any small or new creator looking to break in.
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.
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
Haha fair enough. For what its worth they had iPhone 4’s and Ipod touches. It was close to a decade ago then it was to yesterday.
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.
Why would someone download a fast food app in the first place, I’d pay to NOT have that on my phone lawl
As a Papa Murphys lover, I can’t for the life of me understand why you’d ever need to install their app. You can order from the website just as easily.
I’ll give them a pass as I assume they got some bottom of the barrel developer to cheaply create their app and it doesn’t get anywhere near the level of attention that something like YouTube’s app would.
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)
