YouTube Vanced was a hacked version of the official YouTube app, tailored to activate premium features without subscribing. It achieved this by avoiding YouTube's inherent ad system so that users could view videos without breaks. One of its most used features was background playback, which allowed users to keep listening to videos even while switching apps or locking the screen—something otherwise reserved for YouTube Premium. It also had picture-in-picture (PiP) mode, enabling users to watch videos in a small floating window while multitasking on their device.
Vanced also offered advanced customization features, including forcing high video resolution, overriding default playback rates, and supporting an AMOLED dark mode to minimize battery usage on OLED displays. SponsorBlock was another key feature, which enabled users to skip sponsored parts of videos automatically, ensuring smoother content consumption. The app also added swipe controls for adjusting brightness and volume, akin to features in high-end media players.
As YouTube Vanced was not on the Google Play Store, it had to be installed manually through the Vanced Manager. Because of legal pressures from Google, the app was shut down in 2022, which resulted in alternatives such as youtube vanced being created.
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