Weekly Shot 4 - Ad-Vanced YouTube
In this week’s shot, we’ll be taking a look at an app to take the YouTube experience on your smartphone to a whole new level. It would be an understatement to say this is a life-changing app. Read till the end for the link and installation instructions. Let’s jump in!
Let’s begin by ranting about how annoying the YouTube app on mobile is.
❌Double un-skippable ads (To be fair it’s more of an overall YouTube issue than a mobile app issue specifically but hey, I don’t want to watch 30 secs of ads on a video that’s 10 secs long. Wtf YouTube.)
❌”Dark mode”- More like grey mode
❌ Can’t play videos in the background / No pop-out player
❌ Get reminded every living minute to buy YouTube Premium (Please just stop, we aren’t going to buy it. EVER.)
Welcome our lord and savior, Sir YouTube Vanced.
All those annoyances the standard YouTube app has, YouTube Vanced solves and adds a host of handy tools as well.
✅ Block ALL ads: Banners on the home screen, ads before and in between videos.
✅ True dark mode: Aka Black mode. What dark mode should have originally been.
✅Background play + Pop-out player: You can play music videos/podcasts in the background and switch off the display (Finally!). There’s also a pop-out player which means you can use a different app and watch a video at the same time.
✅ Swipe Controls: You can easily change brightness and volume levels by swiping on either side of the screen while watching a video in fullscreen mode.
✅ SponsorBlock: This uses the same SponsorBlock API as the browser extension which we covered here. SponsorBlock auto-skips any and all sponsored sections of the video including intro/outro sections. Super convenient and time-saving!
Installation
Installation is relatively simple. Head over to https://vancedapp.com/ and download the Vanced Manager APK file.
Note: You should have “install from unknown sources” enabled in your settings. If it isn’t, a pop-up should come up redirecting you to the settings page.
Once you have installed the app, the home screen should look something like this.
Choose YouTube Vanced and click on the install button. On the installation preferences page, I recommend choosing the black version ( ͡• ͜ʖ ͡• ).
You can also install the YouTube Music Vanced app which has background play, adblocker, and high-quality playback as well.
To link your Google account, install Vanced microG in the same way. After installation, it will ask you to log into your Google account after which all your watch history, settings, etc should carry over.
Done! You can customize Vanced settings by going to settings -> Vanced settings and changing options to your liking.
That will be all for this week’s weekly shot. We hope you find this as useful as we did. Don’t hesitate to comment below if you face any issues with the installation. We’ll try to help you with it :)
As usual, if you are looking to support us directly and help us in continually publishing these articles, consider our Patreon and Buymeacoffee pages. Thanks and have a wonderful day :)
