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How to Bring Back YouTube Dislike Counter in Android

In this guide, we will show you the steps to bring back the YouTube Dislike Counter in Android. The Silicon Valley giants keep on testing new features in the background and if it meets their requirements, they decide to implement them right away. But where is the part where they take the opinion from its userbase? Well, unfortunately, it doesn’t exist in the Google ecosystem.

If the feature is in sync with their needs, they would straightaway implement it, without giving the user any flexibility to disable/re-enable it. There could be a plethora of instances that we could share here, with the new tab UI in Chrome for Android being in our recent memory. But now there has been another entry to this list. Google has recently done away with the Dislike counter in YouTube.

Bring Back YouTube Dislike Counter in Android

While the dislike button is still there and you could still dislike the video, however, you wouldn’t be able to get hold of the total number of times a video has been disliked. So what’s the fuss about it? Well, for me and countless other users, this dislike meter was an important metric to determine whether the video was actually what it claimed to be/helpful or just another one of those clickbaits.

Bring Back YouTube Dislike Counter in Android
For a change, Likes > Dislikes

But since this yardstick is no longer there, you will now have to go through the plethora of comments. In some cases, the comments section is disabled and you have no choice but to watch a few seconds of the video to determine its legitimacy. But thanks to the open-source community, there now exists a nifty method through which you bring back the YouTube Dislike Counter in Android. And in this guide, we will show you how to do just that. Follow along.

How to Bring Back YouTube Dislike Counter in Android

Bring Back YouTube Dislike Counter in Android

  1. To begin with, download and install YouTube Vanced Manager [there are many fake sites, the only official one is https://vancedapp.com/. You could reverify the same from their official XDA page].
  2. Then launch the app and checkmark YouTube Vanced (YouTube Music is optional).
    Bring Back YouTube Dislike Counter in Android
  3. You will now be taken to the app’s home page. Expand the Vanced microG section and tap on the Download icon next to it.
  4. Next up, enable the Allow from this source toggle for the installation to complete.
    Bring Back YouTube Dislike Counter in Android
  5. Once installed, expand the YouTube Vanced section and tap on the Download icon next to it.
  6. Then select your preferences and hit the Install button.
    Bring Back YouTube Dislike Counter in Android
  7. Once the installation is complete, head over to the app drawer and launch YouTube Vanced.
  8. Now tap on the profile icon and select Settings.
    Bring Back YouTube Dislike Counter in Android
  9. After that, tap on Return YouTube Dislike settings.
  10. Then turn on the toggle next to Enable RYD. It is now recommended to close and relaunch the app for the change to be reflected.

That’s it. These were the steps to bring back the YouTube Dislike Counter in Android. So here’s how this app managed to carry out this tweak. There is a Chrome extension named Return-YouTube-Dislike [it is open source, you may check out its source code on Github] whose developer has also released an API of the same. The developers of YouTube Vanced have integrated that API into its own app.

As far as the legitimacy of the YouTube Vanced is concerned, there’s always an element of doubt surrounding an app that is downloaded from outside the Play Store. However, I haven’t come across any negative reviews of this app to date. Moroever, to further enhance your privacy, you could probably skip the Google sign-in inside the app.

While your feed may no longer be curated to your interest, but it would be worth the sacrifice. On that note, we round off this guide on how you could bring back the YouTube Dislike Counter in Android. If you have any queries regarding the aforementioned steps, do let us know in the comments section below.

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