Contact Proton VPN Support

Under no circumstances would I purchase this product. Somehow has become less reliable after I upgraded from the free version. Of course there are multiple tiers to choose from, I apparently picked the “pay for absolutely nothing” option. I was hoping it was just me but I see many other comments with the exact same issues. Disconnects randomly, often won’t tell you, or will say it’s connected to a server but be unusable. You will spend more time staring at the ProtonVPN connect screen than you will spend using your search engine almost every time, and often through multiple server hops. I pay for premium and still occasionally will be connected to a free server automatically, and nearly every day it will just turn off without notifying me. Best I can tell is this has something to do with the daily alarms/notifications and the DND mode that turns on when you use your phones sleep/alarm schedule. Screen time limitation options in the iPhone might also affect it, but I have it set as an exception everywhere that’s relevant. Completely turning off and not even attempting to notify or reconnect before allowing internet use seems like an absolutely critical failure for a VPN. Hopefully it gets better and I will gladly change the rating. I want this product to work. For now, stick to the free or go elsewhere.

Initially I want to say that Proton is a fantastic company, their ProtonMail and cloud storage service that is in beta are fantastic products. The ProtonVPN service is equally as impressive but on iOS the service it is fundamentally flawed in a manner that undermines availability and confidentiality. The application has a critical bug where the VPN connection disconnects when a iPhone is locked. I have experienced this issue on 3 models of iPhones and actually stopped subscribing to the service in June 2020 because of this issue. Now 18 months later I signed up to try out ProtonVPN due to the WireGuard protocol support and I assumed this critical bug would have been corrected. The bug is still present after all that time and people use this VPN completely unaware their IP is leaking almost every time they lock their phone. I discussed this issue with their support team 18 months ago and just recently and they still acknowledge it’s a bug and suggest that changing protocol has had “limited” success for some users. I have used other services such as Private Internet Access (PIA) extensively where this problem does not occur at all. I strongly recommend using a different service for iOS until this problem is resolved.

It loses connection when the device is locked. Proton blames iOS but other vpns I’ve tried do not have this issue so if there is an issue with iOS it is possible to make it work anyway but proton is content to deliver a subpar product and blame someone else rather than make it work. I like a lot about proton but if it won’t even stay connected it is utterly useless. Update since ProtonVPN responded to the above: proton continues to try and justify their inferior service by blaming apple. I cannot say what software (apple’s or proton’s) is to blame here but it doesn’t matter to me because either way the service proton claims in advertising to work on iOS does not actually work on iOS. And either way their competition has figured out how to deliver a working service rather than being comfortable shipping a useless service and blaming someone else. The persistent copping out causes me to lose further trust in the company, even if this technical issue is ever fixed there is a low likelihood I ever want to pay for their service again.