If you were asked the biggest players in the VPN business, you may come up with names like ExpressVPN, NordVPN no Surfshark.
However, data is shared only by TechRadar Pro painting a completely different picture. According to app company 42matters, when it comes to the most popular Android VPN services, these well-known providers are no longer visible.
In February, an app called VPN Master was the most popular VPN service on the Google Play Store, downloaded by more than 7 million people throughout the month. In second place was Speed VPN Pro with 6.7 million downloads, followed by Free VPN Tomato with 6.2 million.
A common theme will soon appear: the most popular VPN apps are free to use. Of the top 15 Android VPNs downloaded last month, none are paid services.
Are free VPNs too good to be true?
Ged Free VPNs offering a quick (and obviously cost-effective) way to hide your browsing activity from your ISP, there are several disadvantages to consider. After all, there is no such thing as a free dinner.
Unlike premium services, free VPNs usually only offer a limited number of servers in a small selection of locations and the apps themselves are rarely full of features. Download speeds are also likely to be much lower, which means that streaming geo-restricted VOD content (one of the main reasons users seek VPN) could be off-board from the go- out.
Perhaps the most important consideration, however, is data privacy. While many free VPNs have extensive non-login policies, you cannot be sure that the provider is living up to its promises unless a third-party audit has been conducted.
Without independent authentication, the company operating the free VPN service could collect all kinds of information, including websites visited. , connection time stamps, bandwidth usage and even original IP address.
For anyone using a VPN to get around government-authorized internet censorship, the provider should be concerned about this type of information.
In July 2020, for example, it was discovered that there were seven separate VPN services based in Hong Kong collecting user data, despite the fact that they say they do not collect any user logs. More than one terabyte of this data was revealed online through an unprotected database.
Ultimately, running a VPN service is not cheap, so the company is likely to make a profit for your free VPN service making money from you in some way.
The 10 Most Popular Android VPNs
The numbers below represent the number of downloads of all VPN applications through the Google Play Store in February 2021.
- VPN Master – 7.0 million
- Speed VPN Pro – 6.7 million
- Free Tomato VPN – 6.2 million
- Turbo VPN – 4.4 million
- VPN Lion – 3.6 million
- NetCapsule VPN – 3.5 million
- SecVPN FreeVPN – 3.3 million
- Master increase – 2.9 million
- Free VPN key – 2.9 million
- Turbo VPN Lite – 2.8 million
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