Some annoying internal drama as per leading to some Revanced devs splitting off and creating a new fork. I’ve no idea who’s right so it’s more of a “wait and see which is better maintained for now” situation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1q1we4e/the_revanced_situation_is_crazy_a_new_project/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1q239hy/whats_going_on_with_revanced_should_i_switch_to/
Can someone tl;Dr this for me? I’ve gone almost two years without clicking a reddit link and I’m not about to start now.
Snapshot of comments in those posts. Mostly just governance drama.
From the new fork https://web.archive.org/web/20260107095954/https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1q1we4e/the_revanced_situation_is_crazy_a_new_project/
From ReVanced side
A major contributor submitted a big core change (fingerprint/patcher internals). Maintainers pushed back hard on design and maintainability. The contributor felt stonewalled, got personal, and eventually left. After leaving, they forked the project, copied large chunks of code, squashed commits, stripped contributor history, and allegedly violated GPLv3 rules by changing licensing and attribution. That’s the heart of the dispute.
From there, both sides started accusing each other of bad faith, harassment, threats, ego, gatekeeping, you name it. A small group rallied around the fork and started saying “ReVanced is dead” which… yeah, that’s the part that caused panic. – AI generated summary of a 40~ pg document that someone from ReVance uploaded
Basically the contributor proposed a major redesign to the patcher’s fingerprint system that worked short term but papered over deeper limitations. The maintainers saw it as a band-aid approach that would lock in technical debt and cause long term maintenance problems, so after extensive review they rejected it and pushed for a more fundamental solution instead. The contributor took that personally, issued merge-or-else ultimatums, then left. After leaving, they copied large parts of the code into a new repo, rewrote history to remove attribution, changed licensing in ways that likely violate GPLv3, and went public claiming ReVanced was “hostile” or “dead”. … For context, the fingerprint system is how ReVanced finds the right parts of YouTube’s code to modify even as YouTube updates and shuffles things around. Inefficient or overly abstract changes increase the chance of things breaking later. The contributor wanted a quick duct-tape style fix, the maintainers wanted a proper redesign, and it all spiraled from there.
governance drama
Truly the FOSS project killer
Thank you for the summary. I don’t have a dog in the fight myself. (I use NewPipe) But I’m an FOSS advocate.
Stripping attribution…that’s a GPL violation and that itself is enough to terminate the license. The dates of repo creation and commit dates should be enough to prove causality.
It’s not like the fork couldn’t have stood on its own. Like…wtf was the contributor thinking removing the attribution would do?
The funny part is that there was no attribution to beging with.
The fourth link there is a thread where the maintainer (who didn’t leave) posted a 30-page PDF ‘receipt’ of why the morphe guy was in the wrong, followed by him sealioning any comment that pointed out his entire way of writing is too confrontational, dismissive and blunt.
If dude knew how to word things constructively/took the same courses Linus had to, this never would have happened.
This isn’t surprising, the revanced subreddit moderation was pretty toxic.
Toxic moderation is what the reddit admins want and wanted, they punished mods for doing it any other way. Most (but not all) of the good mods bailed over two years ago now.
There’s also grayjay, tubular and newpipe if you don’t want ads.
GrayJay works great for me
Yes, it’s one of the most stable alternatives in my experience.
PipePipe too, and it ships with SponsorBlock.
FYI in case you didnt know, Tubular is a newpipe fork with sponsorblock built in
Can I log in with Tubular? Why do I need sponsorblock, if I have newpipe? It already disables all ads.
NewPipe blocks Youtube from showing you video ads in the middle of your videos.
Sponsorblock skips the sponsored ad reads, engagement farming, intro segments, etc that the creator puts in the videos themselves.
Witchcraft, I say!
Thank you for the info, grabbed it from f-droid and replaced my newpipe shortcut. Can’t wait to see it in action.
It’s not an automatic system. It’s a database of user subtimitted timestamps. But it’s pretty popular they get added pretty fast on most videos but the smallest channels. The browser plugin has submission tools to allow you to submit the different segments.
You can export and import backups of your subscriptions between these apps btw
You can also install sponsorblock as a plugin in your desktop browser and add new segments that havent been marked yet. Its completely community based like a crowd sourced database of start-end timestamps with tags for what kind of segment it is.
And uBlock Origin.
This is the first I’m hearing of Morphe. Just downloaded it and set it up. Took 10 mins. Faff level: minor. A couple more steps than I remember from Vanced.
I was able to login with my YT account and access my music playlist. I’ve been using Newpipe which is fine, but I’ve really missed that feature.
Of course the Revanced leadership fucked up. Why wouldn’t they? I mean it’s not like the original Vanced project had any issues with leadership that they could have learned from…
Oh. Right.
Just tried Morphe, it’s basically Revanced with a more streamlined patching/installation. I like it a lot for that alone. But I don’t think it’s replacing my Revanced until it gets the CPU usage in check. Both phones I ran it on were getting warm after 10 mins of continuous full-screen video.
Revanced never warmed my phones up.
I’ll give it a while, keep up with the development. Wait it out a bit and try it out again. I’m hopeful.
If I still used reddit I would be tempted to reply to all of the revanced maintainers comments with a picture of a sea lion, since it looks like those are the only comments he knows how to make.
I ended up with pipepipe. So much better.
Ehhh?
Sucks that this is happening because Revanced has patches for lots of apps, and this team seems to be focusing only on Youtube, at least for now.I’ve never used Revanced, but would Grayjay be a suitable alternative?
Grey jay is what I’ve been using since revanced broke. It’s been great for me.
When did revance break? I’m using it right now…
All good on my side. I don’t update the yt app until it breaks, so mine is months old
Same here. Sadly the subscription box broke for me recently gon a habe to troubleshoot a bit it seems.
ReVanced “left”?
The article says several people left the ReVanced team, but doesn’t say why and neither says if that means anything for ReVanced.
Yeah I wasn’t aware of this. I’ve been using it just fine.
Anyone have any info on why people left the ReVanced team? Hadn’t heard about this till now.
deleted by creator
Some developers threw a tantrum and forked it? Ok bye
