When you essentially have a monopoly position, and most of your product updates are to improve your own revenue and not to make the customer experience better because you simply don’t have to do that anymore, eventually people will try to revolt and create alternatives. Because of the network effect lock-in, this kind of creativity (patching the existing monopolist’s app rather than creating a whole new service) is one of the more accessible methods of trying to improve the product. I’m not making a judgment on whether or not it is right, but from a purely providing-the-best-product-to-the-user perspective, I am happy to see alternatives flourish.

There are already alternatives out there (like New Pipe). Vanced was taken down because they tried to monetise it via an NFT which crossed a line.

The NFT had nothing to do with the takedown. According to the Vanced team, it was taken down because the logo they used was too similar to the official one.

Why did Google wait so long? Vanced was hoe many years long? It was absolutely about the NFT thing.