I ended up with pipepipe. So much better.
Is it open-source this time, or will Google be able to C&D development again?
Google C&D’d the original Vanced team because they were stupid and created an NFT out of the logo, which was pretty much just a stylized version of Youtube’s own logo.
The Vanced team claimed otherwise, but the timing was too close to be coincidental.
Never heard of that but I kinda doubt that’s reason, since Google also started moving against adblockers in Chrome around that time, and the lost revenue from advertising just seems like a more substantial reason than some copyright NFT stuff.
Either way, had YT Vanced been open-source at the time someone could have just forked it the next day, so I hope this time around whoever is maintaining the project learned from that.
Of course the Revanced leadership fucked up. Why wouldn’t they? I mean it’s not like the original Vanced project had any issues with leadership that they could have learned from…
Oh. Right.
Some annoying internal drama as per leading to some Revanced devs splitting off and creating a new fork. I’ve no idea who’s right so it’s more of a “wait and see which is better maintained for now” situation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1q1we4e/the_revanced_situation_is_crazy_a_new_project/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1q239hy/whats_going_on_with_revanced_should_i_switch_to/
Can someone tl;Dr this for me? I’ve gone almost two years without clicking a reddit link and I’m not about to start now.
Snapshot of comments in those posts. Mostly just governance drama.
From the new fork https://web.archive.org/web/20260107095954/https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1q1we4e/the_revanced_situation_is_crazy_a_new_project/
From ReVanced side
A major contributor submitted a big core change (fingerprint/patcher internals). Maintainers pushed back hard on design and maintainability. The contributor felt stonewalled, got personal, and eventually left. After leaving, they forked the project, copied large chunks of code, squashed commits, stripped contributor history, and allegedly violated GPLv3 rules by changing licensing and attribution. That’s the heart of the dispute.
From there, both sides started accusing each other of bad faith, harassment, threats, ego, gatekeeping, you name it. A small group rallied around the fork and started saying “ReVanced is dead” which… yeah, that’s the part that caused panic. – AI generated summary of a 40~ pg document that someone from ReVance uploaded
Basically the contributor proposed a major redesign to the patcher’s fingerprint system that worked short term but papered over deeper limitations. The maintainers saw it as a band-aid approach that would lock in technical debt and cause long term maintenance problems, so after extensive review they rejected it and pushed for a more fundamental solution instead. The contributor took that personally, issued merge-or-else ultimatums, then left. After leaving, they copied large parts of the code into a new repo, rewrote history to remove attribution, changed licensing in ways that likely violate GPLv3, and went public claiming ReVanced was “hostile” or “dead”. … For context, the fingerprint system is how ReVanced finds the right parts of YouTube’s code to modify even as YouTube updates and shuffles things around. Inefficient or overly abstract changes increase the chance of things breaking later. The contributor wanted a quick duct-tape style fix, the maintainers wanted a proper redesign, and it all spiraled from there.
governance drama
Truly the FOSS project killer
Thank you for the summary. I don’t have a dog in the fight myself. (I use NewPipe) But I’m an FOSS advocate.
Stripping attribution…that’s a GPL violation and that itself is enough to terminate the license. The dates of repo creation and commit dates should be enough to prove causality.
It’s not like the fork couldn’t have stood on its own. Like…wtf was the contributor thinking removing the attribution would do?
This isn’t surprising, the revanced subreddit moderation was pretty toxic.
Toxic moderation is what the reddit admins want and wanted, they punished mods for doing it any other way. Most (but not all) of the good mods bailed over two years ago now.
There’s also grayjay, tubular and newpipe if you don’t want ads.
GrayJay works great for me
PipePipe too, and it ships with SponsorBlock.
Unfortunately these alternatives suffers from YouTube keep breaking logins then block your IP if you are not signed in after like 3 videos.
There is no login option in NewPipe or PipePipe, you export your subscription from YouTube as a file and import them in any of these apps.
The point is YouTube blocks your IP and your video don’t load if you don’t log in
I know how this app works, I have used NewPipe for years already, this is a pretty recent problem.
I don’t even log in. I subscribe to channels with pipepipe and call it good. I get no ads, notifications on new content, a cleanly organized interface, background play, and easy brightness controls. I personally need nothing else that logging in would provide.
I’ve found that, at least in my case, the block eventually goes away if I either just wait a while or restart my phone. I’m not smart enough to know why waiting might defeat this, though, so take what I say with a pillar of salt.
FYI in case you didnt know, Tubular is a newpipe fork with sponsorblock built in
Can I log in with Tubular? Why do I need sponsorblock, if I have newpipe? It already disables all ads.
NewPipe blocks Youtube from showing you video ads in the middle of your videos.
Sponsorblock skips the sponsored ad reads, engagement farming, intro segments, etc that the creator puts in the videos themselves.
Witchcraft, I say!
Thank you for the info, grabbed it from f-droid and replaced my newpipe shortcut. Can’t wait to see it in action.
You can export and import backups of your subscriptions between these apps btw
You can also install sponsorblock as a plugin in your desktop browser and add new segments that havent been marked yet. Its completely community based like a crowd sourced database of start-end timestamps with tags for what kind of segment it is.
And uBlock Origin.
Some developers threw a tantrum and forked it? Ok bye
Ehhh?
Sucks that this is happening because Revanced has patches for lots of apps, and this team seems to be focusing only on Youtube, at least for now.ReVanced “left”?
The article says several people left the ReVanced team, but doesn’t say why and neither says if that means anything for ReVanced.
Anyone have any info on why people left the ReVanced team? Hadn’t heard about this till now.
