Best YouTube Vanced alternative

 

It is sad to say goodbye to the best YouTube client ever made, if you were not aware of this app beforehand note that this app comes with all of YouTube premium features and more for free! Yes, you heard right for free.

A week ago YouTube Vanced brought back the dislike button that was nuked in videos, and a feature to skip sponsor segment and skip both annoying intro and outro clips. A straight to the business user interface.

Yesterday, March 14, news came in that the YouTube Vanced will be discontinued, some inside information says Google Singapore sues the company for a similar icon but we all know it's because the Vanced app became talk of the town, with all its free premium and extra amazing features.

Here's a fun fact: did you know? YouTube is the one who initially borrowed the idea from Vanced and introduced youtube red/youtube premium. All the adblocking and background playback existed long before Google introduced it.

In a year or 2, the existing Vanced apps will stop working but we got you covered, we have compiled a generous list of alternatives that can be used, they are:

1. NewPipe (which you should have either way for youtube-dl/yt-dlp integration) 1.5 NewPipe fork by polymorphicshade
2. LibreTube (still in early beta)
3. Firefox with uBlock Origin, enhancer for youtube, SponsorBlock and return youtube dislike -> install an addon compatible fork like IceRaven, then install the addons from the addon store
4. YouTube Pink -> [I have no legit link yet]
5. YouTube++ (iOS) -> [I have no legit link yet]
6. SkyTube
7. MusicPiped (F-Droid; YT Music alt.)
8. AdAway (requires root to work full, but no-root DNS mode is also available)! ONLY WORKS FOR YT WEB!
9. VueTube, a very new client.
10. SmartTubeNext, an ad-free YouTube TV client (Android TV only).
11. SongTube, is a YT client for music.
12. YMusic, is a small and simple YT music client with low data consumption.
13. PureTuber, appears to be a fully-featured alternative to the official app. I have not tested not installed this one, because it appears extremely sketchy to me, their FAQ contains lots of red flags (in my opinion).
14. Invidious, an alternative, self-hosted YouTube front-end.
15. DVD, an Android front-end for yt-dlp (an extremely powerful downloader with support for hundreds of sites).

If you want to save videos offline using scripting, you can use yt-dlp running in Termux.

Also, there's xManager-Spotify for... Spotify as a replacement for Vanced Music. I would advise you to not use this with a premium account though since ad blockers are a TOS violation and can get your account suspended. That won't really matter in practice if you just use throw-away accounts though (I'm not a lawyer, so don't quote me on that)

As for what I think are the best ones: Either NewPipe (has some nice features like support for other platforms like SoundCloud and a complete downloader) or the Web version with add-ons (which will give you the most complete experience, including login).

Some things that may or may not work are most popular video players, but they won't allow discovery (except for possibly Kodi)

Finally a pro-tip: If you want to download videos from any YT app, you can install NewPipe and share the link to the video to it from the share menu. Then you can select to always download when sharing to NewPipe.