Quote from Proton VPN:
Google has known about a bug that breaks VPN apps for 7 months, leaving users exposed with no warning or error, just a VPN app that stopped working in the background.
If you’re using ANY VPN on Android, you can help us by getting Google’s attention to fix it.
We first reported this bug to Google in September 2025.
Others like Mullvad and Wireguard reported it even earlier, in August.
Google’s response? “I don’t see anything unusual.”
The bug corrupts Android’s network stack at the system level after a VPN update, causing users to blame their VPN provider.
Restarting the app doesn’t help, with the only fix being a full device reboot or VPN app reinstall, something which most users never figure out.
This affects several VPN providers on Android 16, and only Google has the access to diagnose it properly.
After 7 months of waiting, we’re now asking publicly: Google, when are you fixing this?
Issue Tracker Links:
It’s a feature.
This is basically like watching the enshittification of our Android devices live
Shit like this is the reason I’ve given money to mobile Linux projects
Hell yeah, thanks for donating! For anyone else reading, I’d suggest donating to PostmarketOS, if you have the means. They’re doing extremely good work building the foundation we’ll be able to use to escape Android and google forever.
Any word on Signal working on Postmarket? That’s basically the only thing keeping me from switching, as I rely on signal daily. Whatsapp would be good, too, but I don’t mind having a dedicated, wifi only device for that heap.
From this page, it seems to still have problems, but I’m not sure how up-to-date it is.
Google will ban VPN apps next, I guarantee it.
What you didn’t say was what reason you have for thinking they would do this. “They’re getting shittier all the time” is true, but isn’t an actual reason.
The actual reason is control. VPN on the current Android stack makes it relatively easy for a non-technical user to sign up for a paid service that blocks telemetry-harvesting back to Google. Unlike Apple’s platform, Google’s historically heavily relies on a cloud connection for pseudo-real-time telemetry harvesting. If a person uses a VPN with ad/app/telemetry-blocking, Google gets cut off. That means things like, their Waymo cars not receiving real-time traffic updates, their WiFi geolocation database missing current information, their adtech arm not receiving user metadata.
Google’s software is quite tenacious at attempting to connect to Google too. If you ever want to see how much, install RethinkDNS and start blocking core Google services. Check the logs. You will see the app try Google in your country, then Google in neighboring countries, then other devices in your home running Google software. Any connection they can find to relay telemetry back to the big G-spot.
Google’s moves right now in lieu of any government taking action against them is to solidify their platform control and metadata harvesting pipelines. They’re cutting off alternate ROMs, cutting off open source hardware drivers for newer devices, partnering with Samsung to encourage Samsung to close their devices down, reducing security patch frequency on older devices, partnering more closely with Apple to ensure a stream of healthy metadata from Apple, closing the ability to install third-party apps, and also getting heavier into military contracting.
Google is an information vacuum, always has been. When their leadership was more “altruistic”, the trade-off was a contribution back to society. Now that they are in a late-stage profit phase, they’re just doubling down on that vacuum role hard.
Wanted to switch from iOS to android but honestly I’m wondering more and more if that would even be useful
Also, the fact that the kill switch feature also kills LAN sucks
Switching to a Pixel phone to access GrapheneOS would still be worth it, and a massive increase in privacy and security.
