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The web puts the user in control; apps (on all significant platforms currently existing) put the company in control. Yes, Google and (especially) Apple may for

by veidr 3y ago

The web puts the user in control; apps (on all significant platforms currently existing) put the company in control. Yes, Google and (especially) Apple may force Reddit to comply with this or that, but Google and (especially) Apple also prevent the user from doing all sorts of things they can do with an open platform like the web. Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor. Users can't easily save their favorite content from your app if the company doesn't want them to. Etc. The web is fundamentally user-centric, and apps are roughly the opposite of that. There are also legitimate user-benefiting advantages of apps, such as ability to use the accelerometer or other non-web features, but I can't really think of any that convincingly apply to Reddit's app. Maybe somewhat better push notifications, and "sign in with Apple" but... still seems like another own-goal from team Reddit if they are, in fact, doing this.

baq 3y ago
This, this and exactly this. Their finance team probably made a projection that if they can get X% of current mobile web users onto the app, they’ll be able to extract Y% more total revenue. They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers and even if they had, they have absolutely no idea how to model their value, so they don’t, the board sees the numbers and tells them ‘ASAP’ and that’s how you kill social networks, because the financial model is based on false assumptions.
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  > They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers […] They probably did do the maths and conclude that the contributors who'll stick around are driving a significant part of the desired engagement. Dumb memes and culture war potshots and disinformation sure, but engagement.
- sclarisse 3y ago
  It’s less about extracting that revenue and more about extracting that sweet IPO capital with a story about being replacement-TikTok.
  - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    The IPO capital you can raise is a function of your revenue prospectus. If you have NNN million users, and you have full location tracking, purchase history, device ID, contacts, search history, list of other apps installed, usage data, Wifi SSIDs, Bluetooth beacons, etc. etc. etc. that's going to look like a huge payday compared to those same users running a mobile adblocker. And if you're not currently collecting location tracking data, and you've got half a decade of meteoric growth, well, turn it on. Forecast that graph up and to the right, and just flip the switch to the "get money" position. Due to the winner's curse, you only have to convince a few investors. Even if a significant fraction don't trust your prospectus and imagine that some users might be turned off by a post-IPO monetization scheme, you merely have to convince a small group that your numbers are accurate and you're TikTok 2.0.
    - sclarisse 3y ago
      The key point in that is that many IPO buyers are willing to believe in imaginary revenue that will never be extracted. Extracting revenue as a goal in and of itself uses a different playbook than IPOing.
      - itronitron 3y ago
        Yeah, IPO (or VC) capital at this point is a Pavlov's dog trained to expect riches from every additional bit of private information in the data feed.
- nbar1 3y ago
  > They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers Comments like this amaze me. People really think these giant corps are out here not doing things like this.
  - relaxing 3y ago
    People really think a giant corp acts a monolithic entity with perfect distribution of knowledge and ability and the stupid actions of dumb individuals will always be stamped out rather than amplified. And yes comments like this amaze me too.
  - phire 3y ago
    Me too. Reddit almost certainly ran those numbers. They might have chosen to ignore them. They might have fed biased assumptions into their calculations. Project management might have messed up and deprioritized the features meant to placate that section of the userbase. Institutional churn might have resulted in the corporation forgetting that they ever did run those numbers or why they are now heading down this path.
  - jeltz 3y ago
    Having worked at some quite large companies: yes, it happens for real that they do not do stuff like that. It is likely that some team obviously has ran the numbers but that does not mean they made it to the people who made the decision.
  - parpfish 3y ago
    I think the problem is that people read the analyses that companies share publicly (e.g., in a press release or earnings call), and they assume that that's all they did. You should assume that any numbers shared publicly are just the tip of a giant-ass iceberg and that there were probably 10x more analyses going on internally that weren't shared. The thing that ultimately gets shared publicly is whatever avoids using advanced stats or internal jargon; They want a single soundbite, not a scientific paper with a full methods section.
    - coredog64 3y ago
- xp84 3y ago
  My former boss, someone I used to think had a brilliant business mind, at an e-commerce company, forced us to produce a shitty mobile app, and then to pour more resources into it, because of how the average spending of users in-app was higher. I mean, no sh*t, these are people who are such fans of your brand that they want to download a whole dedicated app for shopping at your site. Of course they’re buying more. I have an app for stores I frequent a LOT, but would not see myself installing one for like, stores that I visit maybe once a year. But the causality was in the other direction.
borbulon 3y ago
Let's not forget that the in-app browser page can be injected with whatever javascript the owner of the app wants. FB/Instagram use this for tracking. There is a more comprehensive list of what apps do this somewhere; I do not remember where it is. But for FB/Meta, you can find the info here: https://krausefx.com/blog/ios-privacy-instagram-and-facebook-can-track-anything-you-do-on-any-website-in-their-in-app-browser https://krausefx.com/blog/ios-privacy-instagram-and-facebook...
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  Worth pointing out that not all in-app browsers are created equal, however. A huge number of apps, probably the majority, on iOS use SFSafariViewController for theirs, which is basically an isolated Safari tab that runs out of process and app developers have no access to. Furthermore, SFSafariViewController instances are unique per-app, each with their own separate set of cookies so apps can’t trick you into visiting a link to gain access to full Safari’s cookies. IIRC Android has something similar that opens an isolated Chrome tab within apps but I have no idea how common usage of that is in Android apps.
  - danaris 3y ago
    The question is, is there any way for the user to tell the difference just by looking? Or is that something you have to be able to examine the binary to be able to determine?
    - antgiant 3y ago
      Yes, the one that is “clean” has the open in Safari icon. However, as soon as that becomes common knowledge I’m guessing the malicious apps will be adding that icon
    - tuukkah 3y ago
      On Android, when you have the WebView open, go to the app switcher and the title will tell you which app provides the view: the original app, or your browser.
    - 3y ago
tedivm 3y ago
> Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor. Adguard does a pretty good job of blocking these things inside of apps.
- aLostSoul 3y ago
  Adguard costs money and non-tech savy userbase has no idea it even exists, even less how to use it. And that is the userbase they wanna keep, I feel like they are purposely alienating their power-user base.
  - soylentcola 3y ago
    Awareness is certainly an issue, but I've enabled adguard's DNS on my mobile device and it does indeed block almost all ads and doesn't cost me any money. Admittedly, I'd prefer not to depend on third party DNS as a solution, but it's trading one entity having access to my requests for another. I used to be able to do this with a simple hosts file/blacklist solution, but I finally succumbed to the various user-hostile policies of "ability to elevate to superuser is OK on a laptop, but not on a phone" and have not enabled su on my current device (needed to manage hosts file).
- waboremo 3y ago
  Adguard blocking inside apps is exclusive to DNS methods, these methods are extremely easy to circumvent by app providers. Reddit (as an example since topic of thread) already gets around these DNS blocking methods because content and ads are served from the same location.
jvanderbot 3y ago
Not only that, they now have a perfect way of tracking the association between multiple accounts, which is very helpful for selling a person's ahem real browsing history.
indigochill 3y ago
> apps are roughly the opposite of that Although I broadly agree with this assessment, I'd just like to add a slight nuance that, at least in my view, it's specifically _app store apps_ that are roughly the opposite. You can still, for example, install random APKs (on Android, I doubt Apple has anything similar) if you're so inclined, so they can be as user-centric as you want. It's just that the major manufacturers optimize for the roughly-anti-user-centric flow.
- malermeister 3y ago
  On Android, you even have f-droid, an entire alternative app store that only accepts open-source, user centric apps!
- kroltan 3y ago
  That depends on the implementation, but its just a fundamental technology difference. On the web, the default way to do things is to use a bunch of HTML elements and whatnot, which are user-agent-introspectable, even if they are modified using a blob of code. With apps, you kind of by definition only have a blob of code. As an user and with a sufficiently advanced operating system, you can block some outside-world interactions like internet connections, but the app only has to give you a render target whose pixels can be drawn to arbitrarily. Some apps even use integrity verification features from the OS vendor to check if they haven't been tampered with, that is much harder to do on the web. Which is incidentally why there is so much interest in high performance web programming and being able to draw arbitrary pixels to a render target (hello canvas/webgl/webgpu). Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years (even ignoring the big obvious attacks like Chrome's Manifest v3).
  - geysersam 3y ago
    > Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years That's s very sad and probably very accurate analysis! Wonder if the arms-race will give rise to other kinds of add blockers that use image recognition to identify ads. But that still requires rendering the ads (even if only in the background), removing much of the benefit of ad-blockers.
beezlewax 3y ago
Surely there is a way of checking api calls made by an app and blocking those? I have never looked into this mind
- tuukkah 3y ago
  HTTPS means the network connections between the app and the backend are opaque to third parties including the user. Certificate pinning means you cannot insert yourself as the backend and/or MITM the requests. The app will only communicate directly with the owner of the private key it was pinned to. Depending on the app and OS, it may be more or less easy to change the app to remove/crack the pinning. In general, if you are not in full control of the device (root), it's not possible.
  - blibble 3y ago
    for android you pull down the apk using adb, patch maybe 1 byte in it and push it back very very easy, no root required
    - exhilaration 3y ago
      I'd love to read a tutorial or watch a video going over the patch process -- can you share any links?
    - tuukkah 3y ago
      I wouldn't call patching a binary very easy, especially since our point of reference was installing an ad blocker extension in the browser. Also, it takes more than one byte if the binary is obfuscated and full of various ways to check that it hasn't been tampered with.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - blibble 3y ago
        > I wouldn't call patching a binary very easy it's even easier than that as all apps (except native ones) will be using the java TrustManager interface > Also, it takes more than one byte if the binary is obfuscated but they can't hide the calls into TrustManager a small utility could automatically take in the APK, patch out the calls and return the fixed APK for you (would probably work for 99% of apps out of the box)
ok123456 3y ago
You can block ads in apps. In android 11, you can have it use OpenDNS's adblocking server.
- rocketbop 3y ago
  I suspect only a small subset of people who generally run an adblocker also block ads on apps as it requires a lot more specialized knowledge.
  - flerchin 3y ago
    Settings -> Network & Internet -> Private DNS -> dns.adguard.com Now you've blocked a large percentage of ads on android.
- passwd 3y ago
  Not always, though. For instance it won't work on YouTube ads. I'd call it a hack at best.
  - exhilaration 3y ago
    I'm sure you're already aware of this, but for other HN users on Android, ads on YouTube are blocked when using Firefox Android + uBlock Origin + m.youtube.com -- the experience isn't as nice as the app but still totally worth it IMHO.
    - ok123456 3y ago
      Use Youtube ReVanced if you want the full app experience.
EMCymatics 3y ago
Shout this from the rooftops. Phone apps delenda est
Xen9 3y ago
Does DNS based blocking work on mobile?
Narushia 3y ago
> Users can't block ads in an app. Yeah, they can. By which I mean, they can do it right away, for the official Reddit app: – https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage – https://revanced.app/download https://revanced.app/download Or, for even less work, you can just use a pre-patched APK with the ads removed: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases No need for root access nor flimsy DNS solutions.
- freedomben 3y ago
  any recommended links to learn more about revanced? the best I can find from their website is that they're a continuation of the "vanced" project but it doesn't say what that was and I haven't had luck on google. It's clear that they have something to do with providing patched apps, but is revanced a framework? is it a library? is it a person or group that does the patching?
  - CapstanRoller 3y ago
    It's a community-driven collection of patches[0] for popular Android apps, supported by a patching framework which includes patch management software (ReVanced Manager[1]). The documentation[2] is very sparse right now. [0] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches [1] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager [2] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-documentation https://github.com/revanced/revanced-documentation
  - Masema 3y ago
    "YouTube Vanced" was meant an "Advanced" YouTube client, minus the "Ad"s. They offered a version of the YouTube client which they patched to remove display ads and video ads, plus add background play, SponsorBlock support, and more. They became fairly popular before Google shut them down for distributing modified versions of their proprietary code. ReVanced was one of the teams that popped up in the aftermath, a spiritual successor. They reasoned that they could achieve the same basic functionality legally if they only distributed patches (instructions) rather than a pre-patched binary. So they wrote an app (ReVanced Manager) that takes a stock copy of the YouTube app, unpacks it, applies patches, then repacks & re-signs it. (They don't have Google's signing keys, so typically users need to install the new version under a new name. Users with root can choose to override the built-in version instead.) Once ReVanced Manager could do that, they expanded into patching other apps as well. So ReVanced is a team that maintains: * A list of useful patches * An engine to apply them * A Java CLI frontend to the patcher * An Android app frontend to the patcher (I've skipped over a lot of the history details but this should give the basic idea.)

by veidr 3y ago

baq 3y ago

This, this and exactly this. Their finance team probably made a projection that if they can get X% of current mobile web users onto the app, they’ll be able to extract Y% more total revenue. They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers and even if they had, they have absolutely no idea how to model their value, so they don’t, the board sees the numbers and tells them ‘ASAP’ and that’s how you kill social networks, because the financial model is based on false assumptions.

Freak_NL 3y ago
> They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers […] They probably did do the maths and conclude that the contributors who'll stick around are driving a significant part of the desired engagement. Dumb memes and culture war potshots and disinformation sure, but engagement.
sclarisse 3y ago
It’s less about extracting that revenue and more about extracting that sweet IPO capital with a story about being replacement-TikTok.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  The IPO capital you can raise is a function of your revenue prospectus. If you have NNN million users, and you have full location tracking, purchase history, device ID, contacts, search history, list of other apps installed, usage data, Wifi SSIDs, Bluetooth beacons, etc. etc. etc. that's going to look like a huge payday compared to those same users running a mobile adblocker. And if you're not currently collecting location tracking data, and you've got half a decade of meteoric growth, well, turn it on. Forecast that graph up and to the right, and just flip the switch to the "get money" position. Due to the winner's curse, you only have to convince a few investors. Even if a significant fraction don't trust your prospectus and imagine that some users might be turned off by a post-IPO monetization scheme, you merely have to convince a small group that your numbers are accurate and you're TikTok 2.0.
  - sclarisse 3y ago
    The key point in that is that many IPO buyers are willing to believe in imaginary revenue that will never be extracted. Extracting revenue as a goal in and of itself uses a different playbook than IPOing.
    - itronitron 3y ago
      Yeah, IPO (or VC) capital at this point is a Pavlov's dog trained to expect riches from every additional bit of private information in the data feed.
nbar1 3y ago
> They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers Comments like this amaze me. People really think these giant corps are out here not doing things like this.
- relaxing 3y ago
  People really think a giant corp acts a monolithic entity with perfect distribution of knowledge and ability and the stupid actions of dumb individuals will always be stamped out rather than amplified. And yes comments like this amaze me too.
- phire 3y ago
  Me too. Reddit almost certainly ran those numbers. They might have chosen to ignore them. They might have fed biased assumptions into their calculations. Project management might have messed up and deprioritized the features meant to placate that section of the userbase. Institutional churn might have resulted in the corporation forgetting that they ever did run those numbers or why they are now heading down this path.
- jeltz 3y ago
  Having worked at some quite large companies: yes, it happens for real that they do not do stuff like that. It is likely that some team obviously has ran the numbers but that does not mean they made it to the people who made the decision.
- parpfish 3y ago
  I think the problem is that people read the analyses that companies share publicly (e.g., in a press release or earnings call), and they assume that that's all they did. You should assume that any numbers shared publicly are just the tip of a giant-ass iceberg and that there were probably 10x more analyses going on internally that weren't shared. The thing that ultimately gets shared publicly is whatever avoids using advanced stats or internal jargon; They want a single soundbite, not a scientific paper with a full methods section.
  - coredog64 3y ago
xp84 3y ago
My former boss, someone I used to think had a brilliant business mind, at an e-commerce company, forced us to produce a shitty mobile app, and then to pour more resources into it, because of how the average spending of users in-app was higher. I mean, no sh*t, these are people who are such fans of your brand that they want to download a whole dedicated app for shopping at your site. Of course they’re buying more. I have an app for stores I frequent a LOT, but would not see myself installing one for like, stores that I visit maybe once a year. But the causality was in the other direction.

borbulon 3y ago

Let's not forget that the in-app browser page can be injected with whatever javascript the owner of the app wants. FB/Instagram use this for tracking. There is a more comprehensive list of what apps do this somewhere; I do not remember where it is. But for FB/Meta, you can find the info here: https://krausefx.com/blog/ios-privacy-instagram-and-facebook-can-track-anything-you-do-on-any-website-in-their-in-app-browser https://krausefx.com/blog/ios-privacy-instagram-and-facebook...

kitsunesoba 3y ago
Worth pointing out that not all in-app browsers are created equal, however. A huge number of apps, probably the majority, on iOS use SFSafariViewController for theirs, which is basically an isolated Safari tab that runs out of process and app developers have no access to. Furthermore, SFSafariViewController instances are unique per-app, each with their own separate set of cookies so apps can’t trick you into visiting a link to gain access to full Safari’s cookies. IIRC Android has something similar that opens an isolated Chrome tab within apps but I have no idea how common usage of that is in Android apps.
- danaris 3y ago
  The question is, is there any way for the user to tell the difference just by looking? Or is that something you have to be able to examine the binary to be able to determine?
  - antgiant 3y ago
    Yes, the one that is “clean” has the open in Safari icon. However, as soon as that becomes common knowledge I’m guessing the malicious apps will be adding that icon
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    On Android, when you have the WebView open, go to the app switcher and the title will tell you which app provides the view: the original app, or your browser.
  - 3y ago

tedivm 3y ago

> Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor. Adguard does a pretty good job of blocking these things inside of apps.

aLostSoul 3y ago
Adguard costs money and non-tech savy userbase has no idea it even exists, even less how to use it. And that is the userbase they wanna keep, I feel like they are purposely alienating their power-user base.
- soylentcola 3y ago
  Awareness is certainly an issue, but I've enabled adguard's DNS on my mobile device and it does indeed block almost all ads and doesn't cost me any money. Admittedly, I'd prefer not to depend on third party DNS as a solution, but it's trading one entity having access to my requests for another. I used to be able to do this with a simple hosts file/blacklist solution, but I finally succumbed to the various user-hostile policies of "ability to elevate to superuser is OK on a laptop, but not on a phone" and have not enabled su on my current device (needed to manage hosts file).
waboremo 3y ago
Adguard blocking inside apps is exclusive to DNS methods, these methods are extremely easy to circumvent by app providers. Reddit (as an example since topic of thread) already gets around these DNS blocking methods because content and ads are served from the same location.

jvanderbot 3y ago

Not only that, they now have a perfect way of tracking the association between multiple accounts, which is very helpful for selling a person's ahem real browsing history.

indigochill 3y ago

> apps are roughly the opposite of that Although I broadly agree with this assessment, I'd just like to add a slight nuance that, at least in my view, it's specifically _app store apps_ that are roughly the opposite. You can still, for example, install random APKs (on Android, I doubt Apple has anything similar) if you're so inclined, so they can be as user-centric as you want. It's just that the major manufacturers optimize for the roughly-anti-user-centric flow.

malermeister 3y ago
On Android, you even have f-droid, an entire alternative app store that only accepts open-source, user centric apps!
kroltan 3y ago
That depends on the implementation, but its just a fundamental technology difference. On the web, the default way to do things is to use a bunch of HTML elements and whatnot, which are user-agent-introspectable, even if they are modified using a blob of code. With apps, you kind of by definition only have a blob of code. As an user and with a sufficiently advanced operating system, you can block some outside-world interactions like internet connections, but the app only has to give you a render target whose pixels can be drawn to arbitrarily. Some apps even use integrity verification features from the OS vendor to check if they haven't been tampered with, that is much harder to do on the web. Which is incidentally why there is so much interest in high performance web programming and being able to draw arbitrary pixels to a render target (hello canvas/webgl/webgpu). Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years (even ignoring the big obvious attacks like Chrome's Manifest v3).
- geysersam 3y ago
  > Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years That's s very sad and probably very accurate analysis! Wonder if the arms-race will give rise to other kinds of add blockers that use image recognition to identify ads. But that still requires rendering the ads (even if only in the background), removing much of the benefit of ad-blockers.

beezlewax 3y ago

Surely there is a way of checking api calls made by an app and blocking those? I have never looked into this mind

tuukkah 3y ago
HTTPS means the network connections between the app and the backend are opaque to third parties including the user. Certificate pinning means you cannot insert yourself as the backend and/or MITM the requests. The app will only communicate directly with the owner of the private key it was pinned to. Depending on the app and OS, it may be more or less easy to change the app to remove/crack the pinning. In general, if you are not in full control of the device (root), it's not possible.
- blibble 3y ago
  for android you pull down the apk using adb, patch maybe 1 byte in it and push it back very very easy, no root required
  - exhilaration 3y ago
    I'd love to read a tutorial or watch a video going over the patch process -- can you share any links?
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    I wouldn't call patching a binary very easy, especially since our point of reference was installing an ad blocker extension in the browser. Also, it takes more than one byte if the binary is obfuscated and full of various ways to check that it hasn't been tampered with.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - blibble 3y ago
      > I wouldn't call patching a binary very easy it's even easier than that as all apps (except native ones) will be using the java TrustManager interface > Also, it takes more than one byte if the binary is obfuscated but they can't hide the calls into TrustManager a small utility could automatically take in the APK, patch out the calls and return the fixed APK for you (would probably work for 99% of apps out of the box)

ok123456 3y ago

You can block ads in apps. In android 11, you can have it use OpenDNS's adblocking server.

rocketbop 3y ago
I suspect only a small subset of people who generally run an adblocker also block ads on apps as it requires a lot more specialized knowledge.
- flerchin 3y ago
  Settings -> Network & Internet -> Private DNS -> dns.adguard.com Now you've blocked a large percentage of ads on android.
passwd 3y ago
Not always, though. For instance it won't work on YouTube ads. I'd call it a hack at best.
- exhilaration 3y ago
  I'm sure you're already aware of this, but for other HN users on Android, ads on YouTube are blocked when using Firefox Android + uBlock Origin + m.youtube.com -- the experience isn't as nice as the app but still totally worth it IMHO.
  - ok123456 3y ago
    Use Youtube ReVanced if you want the full app experience.

EMCymatics 3y ago

Shout this from the rooftops. Phone apps delenda est

Xen9 3y ago

Does DNS based blocking work on mobile?

Narushia 3y ago

> Users can't block ads in an app. Yeah, they can. By which I mean, they can do it right away, for the official Reddit app: – https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage – https://revanced.app/download https://revanced.app/download Or, for even less work, you can just use a pre-patched APK with the ads removed: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases No need for root access nor flimsy DNS solutions.

freedomben 3y ago
any recommended links to learn more about revanced? the best I can find from their website is that they're a continuation of the "vanced" project but it doesn't say what that was and I haven't had luck on google. It's clear that they have something to do with providing patched apps, but is revanced a framework? is it a library? is it a person or group that does the patching?
- CapstanRoller 3y ago
  It's a community-driven collection of patches[0] for popular Android apps, supported by a patching framework which includes patch management software (ReVanced Manager[1]). The documentation[2] is very sparse right now. [0] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches [1] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager [2] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-documentation https://github.com/revanced/revanced-documentation
- Masema 3y ago
  "YouTube Vanced" was meant an "Advanced" YouTube client, minus the "Ad"s. They offered a version of the YouTube client which they patched to remove display ads and video ads, plus add background play, SponsorBlock support, and more. They became fairly popular before Google shut them down for distributing modified versions of their proprietary code. ReVanced was one of the teams that popped up in the aftermath, a spiritual successor. They reasoned that they could achieve the same basic functionality legally if they only distributed patches (instructions) rather than a pre-patched binary. So they wrote an app (ReVanced Manager) that takes a stock copy of the YouTube app, unpacks it, applies patches, then repacks & re-signs it. (They don't have Google's signing keys, so typically users need to install the new version under a new name. Users with root can choose to override the built-in version instead.) Once ReVanced Manager could do that, they expanded into patching other apps as well. So ReVanced is a team that maintains: * A list of useful patches * An engine to apply them * A Java CLI frontend to the patcher * An Android app frontend to the patcher (I've skipped over a lot of the history details but this should give the basic idea.)