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Manuel Vonau • Senior Google Editor

(2251 Articles Published)

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I'm surprised no one had mentioned this yet

It's because there's an annoying trend of everyone reading the headline and not the article. Drives me bonkers

I don't understand this toxic level of optimism found on this platform. if they do client integrity checks, nobody will be able to use an ad blocker. you will have to use an approved YouTube client. it will result in higher ad revenue to Google.

all of these folks who are using revanced will watch annoying ads repeating a thousand times over and the content of the ad will be stuck in their brains exactly as intended. the companies that pay for the ads don't care if you think you are immune to propaganda. they want you to watch.

what part of this is imaginary?

Not all ads are cost per click, many are priced by impression, and that traffic to Vance’s costs money.

So they would make more money blocking Vance, but the impressions from Vance’s users are likely the seething “I’ll never buy from you for making me watch this ad” type.

If you aren’t paying them for Premium, or viewing their ads, you’re literally costing them money. They’d rather stop you from even consuming the bandwidth.

There's definitely a danger if attestation becomes widespread enough that they can require it.

Not a danger of being unable to mod the apps, but they will be able to restrict access to their servers to the official unmodified app, when it's running on specific trusted operating systems.

Yup. I remeber the girls at school listening to bootlegged YouTube videos from shitty rip off apps from the appstore lol. Before revanced, there was vanced, after revanced, a new Phoenix will emerge. The people will it.

At first I thought so too, but I believe those might still work as long as the attestation feature doesn't end up in browsers. Those applications likely can still pretend to be web user.

ReVanced is special because it patches original YouTube. So if the original YouTube would start doing this kind of verification, after being patched it would stop working. To fix it the whole playback code would have to be replaced, but at that point why not use NewPipe or GrayJay.

BTW: Google is doing that because it has monopoly in that market. They similarly have monoly with browser market. Still after uproar they backed off. We really should try to break it and apps that support multiple platforms (like mentioned NewPipe and GrayJay are probably the best way to dethrone them)

They've already tried to kill it like a year or two ago with their last major API changes. This is just another attempt at it.

Google may be wealthy, they may be in control. However, they're still limited by how the technology fundamentally works. You can only secure something so much before you inadvertently damage your own product's functionality by restricting its access too aggressively.

Another thing to remember, YouTube is used by literal billions of people across the entire planet from virtually every notable OS capable of doing so. Locking it down so that only one type of app and web browser can access it would cause them to lose millions of eyeballs and ears, i.e. hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue over time. It'd have the exact opposite effect of what they're trying to do (increase ad profits).

Technically they could, but the effort and checks required to do so would be massive and very disruptive to android in general. They tried something kinda like it with SafetyNet, and it's so trivial to bypass it's being phased out.
Turns out root detection is kinda easy to circumvent if you have, you know, root access.

The effort is so small that they decide not to?

Yes you know your stuff

I don't think it matters. ReVanced patches original YouTube so it will use whatever YouTube is using. Even if current YouTube app doesn't use WebView that's nothing stopping them from adding it in the future.

If I'm reading article right, Google supposedly "discontinued" the attestation technology in Chrome, because of the shit storm, but looks like they are thinking of adding it to Android and use it to verify the devices and applications are genuine. The YouTube server for example might refuse to serve the video if the application is not genuine.

Indeed. And if they decide to brick or degrade all legacy apps, people will just transcode and torrent.

Information wants to be free, and millions of people have the skills to make it happen.