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ReVanced history
With years behind, ReVanced has rich history. Here, it is documented.
- Begin:
- Group formation:
- Name settled:
- First commit:
How it started
ReVanced s where Vanced stopped. Vanced is a predecessing project maintained by different people. Vanced provided a modified version of YouTube with a rich community. Rumors during the time Vanced announced its end revolved around various reasons such as , however, it came to an end by a cease & desist letter from YouTube due to improper use of their media assets. While this sounds like an easy thing to solve for Vanced, it seems Vanced used this as an opportunity to end the project and move on. The day that marked the end of Vanced is the day ReVanced began. An announcement was posted on the Vanced Discord server regarding the end,which led to discussions in the channels of the server. Particularly one which led to the birth of ReVanced. First, it was explored, how Vanced could be kept alive and various ideas were discussed, one of which is the core principle of ReVanced. Unlike Vanced, which modified YouTube and distributed APK files, an open-source patcher ran by the user would apply the modifications. This way, a halt like Vanced would be mitigated, because the patcher and the patches would be open source and ran on the end of the user. This idea was met with skepsis, however some individuals did see a potential and continued the brainstorm around this idea leading to a primitive formation of a handful of people that were interested in it. A Discord server was made for this purpose, which today is the ReVanced Discord server.
Once the Discord server was made, the name "ReVanced" was decided for the project. "Re" would stand for "reverse engineering", "restart", "renewed", "reimagined" and similar to which "Vanced" was appended forming the name "ReVanced". The name was perfect, because it was not only a word-play, but also strategical in the early beginnings of ReVanced. Vanced was discontinued, so the community were exploring for alternatives. The name "ReVanced" sounded familiar to people, whereas "Re" gave a sense of continuation and advancement of Vanced. The slogan "Continuing the legacy of Vanced" further enhanced this, and was a strategic move which lead to the fast grow of ReVanced in the early times. The idea seemed reasonable, the name convincing and soon many people joined the Discord server curious to see how it evolves. In the meantime, the team started to realize the project by creating a GitHub organization, early stages of branding, proof-of-concepts and performing research. The Vanced APK file was reverse-engineered to understand the modifications that would later be realized as open-source patches. Eventually a proof-of-concept was created that did patch the YouTube application which proved the potential of the idea for the first time. At the same time other initiatives have started to continue what Vanced had left. However, ReVanced was different. Instead of developing a similar solution like Vanced, ReVanced provided a unique concept to patch apps, that was later abstracted and scaled to be able to patch any app arbitrarily, thus not only making it a continuation of Vanced, but something much bigger than that, a general-purpose patcher for Android applications as seen today. The team was successfully coordinated into developing the patcher and the patches to ensure an efficient workflow right from the begining of ReVanced. With the code being open, developers alike started to get involved and form ReVanced into shape.
Branding
At one point in time, when ReVanced was already an established initiative, ReVanced did not have proper branding like logo, or guidelines. ReVanced started with basic iterations of brandings and settled with one that looked similar to the current one. This logo accompanied ReVanced for a while, however, did have room for improvement. ReVanced decided to implement proper branding. The community was given time to submit logo ideas and concepts, which eventually would be voted. A vote was made eventually, however the winning logo was an improved version of the one used at that time. This showed, that the community got familiar with the logo already and liked it the most. Once the logo was chosen ReVanced began to design a final, proper version of the submission forming the current ReVanced logo. Not everyone was satisfied, however the majority seemed to be okay with the logo. A second poll was made afterwards to lock in the logo with the community one last time.