I switched to Morphe after ReVanced stopped working, and it's basically everything I loved about the original

Published Sep 2, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT João has been covering the tech world for over 7 years, with a heavy focus on laptops and the Windows ecosystem. I also love all things tech and videogames, especially Nintendo, which he's always happy to talk about. Prior to joining XDA in 2021, he worked at Neowin: https://www.neowin.net/news/poster/jo%C3%A3o-carrasqueira/ If you're an Android user, you're probably familiar with YouTube Vanced, or more recently, ReVanced. These were projects that modified the official YouTube app (and later others as well) to remove things such as ads and other intrusive features users didn't like. Vanced was forced to be discontinued, and seemingly, the official ReVanced project (many others took the same name) went the same way. But now there's a successor to this project that brings it all back, and it's called Morphe. It's just ReVanced again, and I love it. Morphe fixed what ReVanced had broken The project just seemed to die Many times I have to research topics specifically for an article, but the transition from ReVanced to Morphe was something I had to do naturally. I had been using ReVanced for a long time, but it had been a while since it had received updates, and I was running into an issue where my YouTube videos would always freeze at the 1-minute mark. If I was using Wi-Fi, the video would eventually resume, but on mobile networks, it would freeze indefinitely and I had to resort to using the YouTube website. It turns out ReVanced has seemingly been abandoned for a while, seemingly due to GitHub asking the developers to take down the repository. While it was moved to GitLab as a temporary solution, both the GitLab and GitHub repositories have gone months without updates. I ended up finding a reference to Morphe on Reddit, which prompted me to look it up and install it. Since then, it's been my go-to for watching YouTube on my phone. What Morphe does It's essentially ReVanced with a new name Morphe is very much like ReVanced in that it doesn't give you a modified APK right out of the gate. Instead, the team offers a "patcher" app (much like ReVanced) where you can load the original APK file and have modifications applied to it directly, so you can then install the modified APK file. The Morphe team itself allows you to patch just three apps: YouTube, YouTube Music, and Reddit, and all of them include patches for removing ads, but also enhancing the experience in other ways, such as disabling certain features users tend to dislike. In the case of YouTube, you also get other YouTube Premium benefits like background playback, which is the primary reason I use Morphe over the official app. Morphe will usually recommend a specific version of the base app to use for patching to ensure everything works, though you may still get lucky with newer versions. I noticed quickly that Morphe was working with a newer version of the YouTube app compared to ReVanced, which may have been why I was actually able to use it. The ReVanced version was old enough that I can imagine it was no longer meant to be supported by Google. ReVanced featured support for more apps, and the Morphe team says it's working to add support for more apps as well. The GitHub project asks developers to create their own repositories if they have patches for other apps, though YouTube is the only one I really care about. How to use Morphe It's fairly easy Using Morphe can be done in one of two ways. There's the Morphe Manager app for your phone, which works much like ReVanced, or the Morphe Desktop app, a Java application you can use on most desktop operating systems. For the latter, you'll also need to download and install the Java Runtime Environment first. In either case, you'll also need to download the recommended APK file (or a newer one, if you're adventurous) from a website such as APKMirror. For Morphe Desktop, you'll also need to manually download the patch files from the GitHub repository. With these tools in hand, it's simply a matter of selecting the app you want to patch, choosing the APK file you downloaded, and selecting the patches you want. Depending on your phone and PC model, this may be a good bit faster on your computer. I usually patch my apps using my Fairphone 5, but it takes a few minutes to get through the process. It's best to avoid other clones And pre-patched apps, too If you've been having issues with ReVanced like I did, you may be tempted to go search for solutions online, but there are plenty of projects using the ReVanced name that aren't affiliated with the original ReVanced team, and some may be using pre-patched APK files which can be potentially dangerous. Morphe is actually developed by a group of people that also worked on ReVanced in different ways, so there's more reason to trust these developers. And since you provide your own APK and you can select the patches to apply, you have more control over the experience. Still, when using Morphe with a platform like YouTube, it's good to remember that there are many creators whose livelihood may depend on you engaging with their content legitimately, so you might want to show your support in a more meaningful way. Hopefully it lasts Naturally, the companies behind the original apps that projects like Morphe modify aren't all too happy that these projects exist, so there's always a chance Morphe will be taken down for reasons similar to previous projects of this nature. For the time being, though, it works and it's getting frequent updates, so it's a good time to give it a shot. Morphe