How to Watch Ad-Free YouTube Videos on Android, Even Without Vanced

NewPipe

NewPipe is not a modded version of the YouTube app, like Vanced was. It’s a separate, free, and open-source player for YouTube. It’s lightweight, but it offers the features you care most about: No ads, background playback, and picture-in-picture. NewPipe is the app I have personally used over the past couple of years.

Just like Vanced, NewPipe isn’t available on the Play Store. But you can directly download the APK installer from their website, or you can find the app on the F-Droid app store (an alternate to Google Play Store, which hosts free and open source apps).

SkyTube

This is another free and open-source third-party YouTube app, just like NewPipe. It also offers the basic features you’ll want, including no ads, and background payback.

The only real downside is that this is a view-only app. You can’t sign in to your YouTube account, so there’s no sync feature. The app has its own feature for channel subscriptions and bookmarks.

uBlock Origin add-on for Firefox

One clear reason for using Firefox over Google Chrome on Android is its huge gallery of free add-ons. And they’ll come really handy here. If you install the uBlock Origin add-on, you’ll get an ad-free YouTube experience in the browser. Go to Menu > Add-ons > and enable uBlock Origin.

The downside? No features like offline downloads.

Brave Browser

Vanced themselves recommend you use the Brave browser to watch ad-free YouTube videos on Android. The app comes with an ad-blocking feature by default, and as long as you have enabled the Shields Up feature for the YouTube site, you should be good to go.

Use an ad-blocking VPN

Alternatively, you can use an ad-free VPN on your Android smartphone. This will stop ads from loading across your devices, and it will protect you from online tracking, as well. Vanced suggests you try Adguard, but you can use any ad-blocking VPN for this purpose.