Is it safe to Use Revanced Apps for ,i.e, Reddit and Youtube

  1. Is it safe to use them instead of the official Apps? On security level and Privacy level is there any problem by using those?

  2. If i am Using a private DNS , can i use Rethink or anyother as my firewall without turning on the Rethink DNS ?

If you are using Revanced apps, you have to put trust in the developers to not put in any malicious code, just as you would the official apps. I would assume that they probably aren’t doing anything bad, but we don’t really know if they are doing anything outside of what they say they do without packet sniffing and reverse engineering of the apps.

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To start things off i want to make sure we are talking about the same ReVanced. If not please let me know what project you are refering to. I was un aware that the ReVanced team had expanded their patch offerings out from just youtube.

I think there are two issues at play with regard to ReVanced.

  1. Potential Legal issues, the linked article applies to the original YT Vanced. Although i believe some of these issues might linger.

Mainly i remember YT Vanced didn’t actually distribute Vanced as an APK. Instead the user needed to install the “Vanced app manager” i believe it was called. This app manager did two things, Install Microg, and morph the official Youtube app into YT Vanced. I do not know the legal or security implications for this case; however this approach always rubbed me the wrong way.

All of that was to say that it appears that ReVanced is “patching” apps in the same way the original YT Vanced was doing.

  1. Requiring the extension of trust to a third party app developer, as @gregandcin mentioned could problematic depending on your threat model.

Personally i have kind of given up on front ends for this reason; an extension of trust is required and the privacy benifit is often negligable when compared to the first party front end. The exception to this for me is tools like rss, or GrayJay/NewPipe were the “front end” provides a unified user interface for content from multipe platforms.

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You can use revanced to patch the dead Reddit is fun for it to work again for instance.

I too am curious if it’s safe to use assuming we trust the developper.

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I haven’t seen any malicious code personally (not that I’m in anyway good at auditing large code bases). I personally use revanced to patch YouTube, sync for reddit, Tumblr, etc. any “legacy” non private things I need to access. I personally have trust in the project but I am no authority when it comes to this kind of thing.

also they always make you patch the app. never trust a pre-patched app from any source unless you have complete trust in such party.

I think that there is no guarantee since it isn’t open-source. I understand for YouTube since they are blocking hard, but for Reddit, just use Redlib. A good, alwaya working instance is [ l.opnxng.com](https:// l.opnxng.com)

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Im no auditor but Revanced seems to have some good rep. I used to use it and honestly thinking about using it again because a lot of these youtube clients ive been using give me a lot of issues.

But be careful if you decide to use it. There is a lot of fake websites, and always patch it yourself. I think the Revanced subreddit has the official link.

Also in terms of privacy, I dont think it blocks trackers by default, but if your using a private dns or rethink you will be fine there. Also it uses micro G if you arent rooted, which i think is open source.

ReVanced’s maintainers and contributors are reputable people, I doubt they would do anything malicious. But of course, at the end of the day, you have to trust that they won’t do anything bad.

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I mean, a profile of you will be definitely be built, but as long as it isn’t associated with your real-world ID it is ok I guess.

Yes definitely, since using micro g you use a google account. You can use revanced without an account but it would be very limited

You don’t need an account to get recomendations.