I’ve been a longtime user of ProtonMail and ProtonVPN and am incredibly grateful of everything they’ve done to make privacy accessible to more people. I also really love the new ProtonMail app. But ProtonVPN has problems.
To some it up, it seems like functionality has been sacrificed for vague aesthetics.
Specifics:
The name of the country you are connected to is in tiny text down near the bottom of the screen. This is even worse if you are connected to the “fastest country”. Instead most of the screens real estate is dedicated to a gray globe like map with the country you are in unlabeled, so unless you are geography wiz, it’s hard to tell where you’re located at a glance.
Profiles have been wrecked. I know they’ve been replaced by recents, but that’s far less obvious and the connection defaults for whatever you have set in settings. As someone paying over $500 dollars a year to Proton, I don’t want a simple basic VPN, I want granular control so I can have different profiles for different purposes.
The performance metrics for a server are no longer easily visible. I have to click into a separate screen to see server load and speed.
What happened to random connections? Why is fastest server so prominent? If you’re using a VPN chances are you don’t want to appear in your home country, yet your home country will almost always be the fastest. Switching to other servers now has extra steps.
I appreciate the effort to keep the app fresh and improve user experience, but I feel like we’ve gone backwards in a lot of ways. I don’t mean to rant and I don’t want to sound to critical, because I love this company, but I think these are real annoyances that make the user experience for more sophisticated users much worse.
Honestly speaking, I don’t like the latest update. I liked how I can manage my connection on a single screen, where list of countries/servers, server load, connect/disconnect button were on the same screen. Now I have two screens and has to switch between them. Kinda bad usability.
Profiles were nice, yet I only used them on PC. New ‘recents’ list gives me a vibe of logging. Like if I’ll be forced to unlock my phone and expose it - not only the fact that I use VPN will be exposed but also range of IPs (country specific) that may link me to some actions. Typical paranoid use case for this - using social networks in countries with censorship. Would be nice to have recents as optional feature (on/off in settings).
As for your (4) - it was long before this update that your local country server was enforced as much as possible. I wish to see an option not to use local country when automatically choosing server in app setting. Both on mobile and PC.
In one fell swoop, most of the original UI functionality has been demolished.
Original UI showed, at a glance, a graphical display of the location of the server and its performance. It also listed all servers available in the country of the server so you could quickly scroll down in order to switch to a different one instantly if the current one didn’t perform to your liking. An absolute necessity, given the timely nature of shared resources.
Current UI shows only the country of the server and connection status in text. To change the server, you have to click the Countries button, scroll down to the country you want, click that country’s button, and scroll to the bottom of a huge list to find a server that has a low load. If that doesn’t perform, you have to repeat all this each time until you find one that does perform. So, from a quick simple ‘scroll-and-click’ to a slow, complicated ‘click-scroll-scroll-and-scroll-click’ to accomplish the same end.
Between this new development and the recent demise of the protonvpn API CLI, it is crystal clear that the Proton developers don’t give a damn about the paid user’s time wasted or negative experience. This seems to be a trend in mobile apps in general as development is handed over to uncaring inexperienced newbies. This is unacceptable IMO. I am paying a large enough monthly fee to expect much better treatment.
I’ve just checked and the only thing I find missing is profiles.
You have just an extra screen that shows you the map, but if you go to the second screen, it’s the same as before, with the difference that countries are now grouped so you can find quickly the country you want to connect.
if you don’t want to use the fastest country it’s perfect, you just select the country you like the first time and that becomes your new default connection. You can even remove fastest from the recent by swapping right
Hi! We made some changes on the Free plan to improve connection speed:
We’ve added new free servers in Romania and Poland (on top of the US, Netherlands and Japan).
Now, you are auto-connected to the fastest server available by default (which is preferred by 99% of users).
Load balancing formula has been improved.
The default connection will give you the best experience available. You can, however, choose to change to another randomly allocated server.
If you want to access country-specific content, we recommend checking out our paid plans, where you can choose between 70+ countries: . Our free VPN has no ads, no logs, and is as secure & private as our paid plans. It’s made possible thanks to the support from our paid users, NOT your data. With that in mind, certain features are necessarily available only on our paid plans.
The discussions related to this are taking place here:
That functionality helps, but it was the customizability that really mattered. As others have pointed out, having a recents section in the first place is somewhat problematic from a privacy perspective, especially in dangerous countries.
I want to use fastest country. But the one that doesn’t matches my local country. Use case: I’m trying to overcome some censorship and default option brings me to country with censorship.
It would be really nice to have an option in settings to exclude local country from connection profiles.
Can you elaborate more on that?
If you are in a dangerous country, having a VPN in the first place is already enough to get in you in jail, how would a recent button make things worse?
