On March 13, popular alternative YouTube client Vanced announced it would be shuttering its service in the immediate future. Most folks probably know Vanced as a way around YouTube’s ads, but there’s more to it than that: the Android app enables a lot of features that YouTube could feasibly fold into its own app without gutting creator revenue or hurting its own bottom line. Here are the ones we’d most like to see in the official YouTube app.
A darker dark mode
Left: YouTube’s dark mode. Right: Vanced’s dark mode.
YouTube’s dark mode is worlds better than its light mode for browsing videos until well after you should’ve gone to sleep, but as with many of Google’s apps, the theme is primarily dark gray. Vanced, on the other hand, offers “AMOLED dark mode,” which is phone nerd talk for a theme that incorporates a lot of true black — and so looks nicer (and darker) on OLED displays. Of all the Vanced features YouTube could crib, this one’s surely the simplest.
Full picture-in-picture (without Premium)
If you cough up $12 a month for YouTube Premium, you get a number of perks. Chiefly, you no longer see ads in videos, as the ad revenue generated by your eyes is replaced by real revenue generated by your wallet. Vanced got around all that, but free content with no ads is a pretty tall order to replicate in the official YouTube experience — products typically have to make money to continue existing. But some of the simpler features Vanced snuck out from behind Premium’s paywall are much smaller asks.
One such feature: picture-in-picture video playback. With YouTube Premium, you can navigate away from the YouTube app while any video is playing, and the video will shrink down into a little floating window over whatever you’re doing. If you’re a free user, though, many videos — music in particular — just stop. That wasn’t the case with Vanced; the app supported full PiP regardless of your Premium status. The official app should, too — it feels like a bizarre feature to lock behind a subscription.
Bring back dislikes
YouTube removed dislikes from public view late last year — ostensibly in a bid to foster a more positive social experience by discouraging behavior like concerted dislike campaigns. Dislike counts are still privately viewable by creators, but the loss of a way to judge a video’s quality at a glance isn’t one that sits well with a lot of YouTube users. Vanced made it its business to bring the dislike count back. The method is questionable at best — it employs an API that purportedly uses “archived data” and “extrapolated extension user behavior” to approximate a dislike count — but the goal is an admirable one. Bring back public dislikes, YouTube. We miss them.
Background play (without Premium)
Listening to videos with your screen off (or while you’re using other full-screen apps) is a Premium-exclusive feature. That’s to drive people using YouTube for music toward, er, YouTube Music, but it’s grating nonetheless. Vanced circumvents this limitation, allowing for background play of any video by any user. It’d be great to see YouTube bring background play back to ad-supported accounts — surely the incessant ads are enough incentive to pay for Premium.
Better resolution settings
Left: YouTube’s quality settings. Right: Vanced’s quality settings.
The official YouTube app’s resolution settings suck. You can choose between “Auto,” “Higher picture quality,” and “Data saver” for your default setting, and even choose different settings for when you’re on Wi-Fi versus mobile data. But “Higher picture quality” typically means 1080p, even when videos are available in higher resolutions. To watch in 1440p or 4K, you have to manually set the resolution on each video you watch. It’s mildly infuriating.
Vanced offers more in-depth settings that allow you to choose your preferred resolution across all videos, even going so far as to let users stream video in higher resolutions than their phones can display. That last bit is questionably useful, but I wish I didn’t have to manually tell YouTube every time I want it to use my S22 Ultra’s full resolution.
Video downloads (without Premium)
This one’s getting a little pie-in-the-sky, but offline video playback is an extremely convenient feature for anyone with spotty reception, a slow connection, or a restrictive data cap. While the official YouTube app gates the feature behind Premium, Vanced opens it up to all users. Getting the same functionality to work in an ad-supported model might be tricky, but considering it’s an official function of the YouTube Go app, Google really ought to be able to figure it out in the full YouTube app.
Aside from providing entirely free content, as nice as that admittedly may be for individual users, Vanced does a lot right that YouTube is currently doing wrong (or could at least be doing better). It addresses a number of features of the official YouTube app that are pretty universally unpopular. With Vanced shutting down, YouTube has one less thing to worry about — but as long as it keeps ignoring its users’ wants, there’ll always be alternatives to fill the gaps. With any luck, YouTube’s taking this time to reflect on why those alternatives exist in the first place and making plans to adjust accordingly.
Probably not, but we can dream.
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