Google could kill YouTube Vanced for good::The company is exploring an integrity API that could lock down WebViews with DRM
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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 actually am a developer who works for a hospital. I wouldn’t write articles or otherwise create materials discussing the “nitty gritty medical details”.
deleted
I don’t know any apps that work like that. I’m pretty sure even the YouTube is just an app
deleted
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.
So many articles these days add nothing to the headline. They literally repeat the same paragraph, slightly reworded. It’s getting so bad that the first paragraph is usually made up of the same few sentences, repeated.
There’s no place like
homeReddit.There’s no place like
homeReddit.There’s no place like
homeReddit.
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.
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
Yeah, as someone in ops in another industry I would just chaulk this up to the cost of doing business, cut my losses, and move on. I can’t imagine most people are using ad blockers.
I doubt they think about the “army of independents” much at all.
With the multiple updates per day they’ve been hammering out against the ublock origin devs, I would disagree with that. Can’t think of a way they would be accidentally hashing it out against each other per matter of hours
They want to get paid, I just don’t think they see any competitor as a threat.
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.
You can try to look it up if you want, but I’d suspect those sort of interactions are fractions of a penny on the dollar compared to revenue from Premium or Ads.
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.
It would suck but things would go on. I’m sure other places like tiktok would salivate at the idea of a YouTube exodus. Also there’s other platforms that would gladly have, at least, subsections of YouTube. Plenty of other places to post your gaming videos.
Letting TikTok win is not good. Unless something has changed, they pay shit to creators too.
Not all ads are cost per click, many are priced by impression, and that traffic to Vance’s costs money.
So they would make more money blocking Vance, but the impressions from Vance’s users are likely the seething “I’ll never buy from you for making me watch this ad” type.
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.
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.
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.
Of course they would, the bastards. I’m assuming that would also affect newpipe and freetube too?
Consumers have created this future by flocking to YouTube and nothing else.
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?
