YouTube Vanced to be shut down over ‘legal reasons’

YouTube Vanced, a popular alternative to YouTube that offered users an ad-free experience for years is being shut down. Google has forced the creators of the app to close the project over legal reasons.
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The official Vanced Twitter handle has now posted a new thread which announces the decision. “In the coming days, the download links on the website will be taken down. We know this is not something you wanted to hear but it’s something we need to do,” a tweet in the thread says.
Check out the tweet below.

Currently installed versions will work just fine, until they become outdated in 2 years or so.
— Vanced Official (@YTVanced) March 13, 2022
As per a report The Verge, Vanced owners were sent a letter Google that forced the developers to stop dributing and developing the app. “We were asked to remove all references to ‘YouTube’, change the logo, and remove all links related to YouTube products,” an admin from the Vanced team said to publication.
Vanced was a popular app amongst Android users due to many reasons. It offered an ad-free experience which was preferred over the regular YouTube app, which offers multiple ads at the beginning of a video, sometimes even putting a couple of ads in the middle of videos.
YouTube Vanced also allowed users to use a completely black theme that leveraged AMOLED display phones, and also other customisations that the official YouTube app simply lacked.

While Vanced was not available on the Play Store, the Vanced website allowed users to download an APK file and sideload it, even integrating their Google account to sync their data including subscribed channels, comments and everything else.
The exing version of Vanced will continue to work for now, suggests the official announcement. However, with no further updates expected, the current versions will be outdated in about two years from now.