How the YouTube Vanced alternatives divide up
Nothing replaced Vanced one for one, and that is the first thing to understand about this list. Vanced was a finished, modified copy of Google's own app. Distributing something like that is exactly what ended the project in March 2022, so the replacements took different routes rather than repeating it.
One family keeps Google's client and changes it locally. ReVanced belongs here: it hands you tooling that patches an official YouTube APK you supply, which is why there is no prebuilt app to download and why the process has to be repeated when YouTube updates. The interface and the account features survive intact.
The other family throws the official app away and rebuilds the client. NewPipe reads YouTube's public pages itself. LibreTube goes through Piped servers so requests reach Google from a datacenter rather than your phone. SmartTube does the same job for televisions. All three drop Google account sign-in as part of the deal, which is the trade nobody advertises loudly enough.
Where each project stands
| App | Status | Recent Activity |
|---|---|---|
| ReVanced | Active | Regular patch & Manager updates |
| NewPipe | Active | Ongoing development, extractor updates |
| LibreTube | Active | UI improvements, instance management |
| SmartTube | Active | Regular updates for Android TV |
| Grayjay | Active | New platform plugins |
| Tubular | Active | Follows NewPipe upstream |
| FreeTube | Active | Desktop client improvements |
Notes on the less familiar names
Four of the seven above have their own profiles on this site. The rest are worth a sentence each, since they come up constantly in recommendation threads and rarely get explained.
- Grayjay comes from FUTO and covers several video platforms rather than YouTube alone. Its code is published, but under the organisation's own licence rather than a standard open-source one, which is a distinction worth knowing before you compare it against the others on that basis.
- Tubular is a fork of NewPipe that tracks the same upstream code and adds features the main project has kept out of scope. If you like NewPipe but miss something specific, this is usually where people are pointed.
- FreeTube is a desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is the only entry here that is not an Android app, and it fills the gap for anyone who wanted Vanced-style viewing on a computer.
What stands out
- Privacy keeps gaining weight in how these projects position themselves
- SponsorBlock support has quietly become a standard feature rather than a differentiator
- Some apps, Grayjay among them, are branching out past YouTube into other platforms
- On Android TV, SmartTube remains the option most people end up with
A fourth pattern is less welcome. Every app on this list is distributed outside Google Play, so every one of them has impostor download sites trading on its name. The absence of a store listing to check against is now a shared property of the whole category, not a Vanced-specific problem.
Choosing between them
If you want the YouTube interface and your Google account, the answer is ReVanced, and the cost is the patching process. If you want the lightest possible client and never signed in anyway, NewPipe. If you want Google to see as little as possible and you can tolerate switching servers when one stops responding, LibreTube. If the screen is a television, SmartTube. If you would rather pay than sideload, YouTube Premium is the official route and the only one that reaches iOS.
What to watch
Activity in this category is uneven by nature, because these are volunteer projects working against a service that changes on its own schedule. The useful signal is not marketing but commit history: an app whose repository has gone quiet for a long stretch will start failing eventually, whatever its feature list says. Checking the releases page of whatever you install, once in a while, is the whole of the maintenance burden.