YouTube Vanced, a popular third-party YouTube app, is set to shut down.
An update shared on the app’s channel on Telegram as well as on Twitter states that the app has been discontinued and that download links to the app from the Vanced website would be taken down “in the coming days”.
A later update to the initial statement, which went out last night, intimates that the move to discontinue Vanced is due to ‘legal reasons’.
Now, this could mean many things but, given what we know about the app’s operations, copyright issues and the like could be a direct pointer to the woes faced by the app’s developer(s).
The Verge reports that the Vanced team was sent a cease and desist letter by Google, YouTube’s owner.
The YouTube Vanced app has risen in popularity over the years due to several reasons.
Chief among them is the ability for users to block ads on YouTube, something that many find irritating. While there is an option to pay to not have ads on YouTube, that option, which is what gives rise to YouTube Premium, is not available to users in many countries outside the United States and several other markets where Premium exists. For users, like us in Kenya for instance, workarounds like Vanced have been the go-to method of shutting out annoying ads.
Vanced has also offered its own customizations that the stock YouTube app on mobile does not offer, making it popular with users. Additionally, given the unavailability of Google apps and services on Android-based platforms that are not certified to run them like Huawei’s EMUI, Vanced had lately become a good way of circumventing the unavailability of YouTube’s app on Huawei devices.
The current available version of the Vanced app should continue to work, according to its creators. For how long, though?
