The best Android VPN apps
What are the best Android VPN apps to avoid region blocks and visit websites that are banned from your country?
Why an Android VPN app is quite useful
Companies and governments are getting better and better at determining who you are and where you come from based on your IP. Sometimes that is useful, but often it means that you cannot access certain content or that all kinds of private information about you is stored. You can prevent it by using a VPN.
Useful for avoiding regional blockades
For example, do you want to visit an American website? Then it sometimes happens that you cannot visit it from the European Union. That’s because not every website owners feel like showing something like the consent box when cookies are set. The easy solution is then geofencing of the European visitors. There are also often country or region-specific copyright claims that are evaded with geofencing.
There are also certain websites that are blocked from the Netherlands, such as the Russian propaganda channels RT.com and Sputniknews. It is better to take the strongly colored and often lying news on these sites with a gritter. But the topics are often interesting. For example, you can search further for information about things, for example news from Central Asia and Brics, that are underexposed in the western media.
The protection of a VPN is good, but not perfect. This way, your internet service provider does keep logs. So it’s best to be careful, even with an Android VPN app.
What are the best Android VPN apps?
- My personal favorite is the Swiss one Proton, set up by scientists working on the CERN project. Proton is free, quite fast and very user-friendly. Without paying you can start browsing via a Dutch, an American and a Japanese server. Proton can be found in the App Store. If you take a paid subscription, around € 5 to € 10 per month, you can simulate a different origin via servers in almost 70 countries.
Swiss privacy laws are strict, but if the Swiss court grants a legal request, your IP can still be logged. In practice, this concerns serious crimes (for example, a French environmental terrorist was caught) and not, for example, the illegal download of a film torrent. Torrent users do complain about the relatively low speed. The Swiss government also supports the company, which is remarkable.
- Express VPN is the most popular paid Android VPN app. At 7-13 US dollars per month, this provider is not cheap. The company is based in the British Virgin Islands. The strong point of Express VPN is the high speed and the large number of locations where they have servers. Express VPN also falls under the law of the British Virgin Islands. And will therefore have to cooperate if the judge there orders that. On the positive side, you can pay with bitcoins if you want to.
- Another good alternative is PIA, Private Internet Access. You can temporarily go to this provider for € 2 per month. If you commit and pay in advance for two years. The prices per month are here a tenner. This provider is also very fast. Here you can also pay with Bitcoin and some other coins. This provider is based in the United States, which is an annoying country in terms of copyright. But because PIA does not keep any logs, lawyers and courts were rejected.
