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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get the purpose of “VPN apps” as opposed to just signing up for a VPN service and setting it up in iOS settings.

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Using an app allows you to use a custom protocol. Standard VPN protocols do a good job of protecting your information, but they don't even try to hide the fact that you're using a VPN at all, so they're not suitable for a situation where you're trying to get around a system that tries to block them completely.

That's silly. That's like wondering why people use awful streaming sites to watch movies and not download high quality torrents instead.

Ease of use, easy of discovery, learning curves, etc.

That one probably also has something to do with getting letters from MAFIAA if you torrent but not if you use streaming sites.

You have no problems with the RIAA once you move to Private Trackers, but that does take a considerable time sink and a bit of dedication to breach. So point still stands.

What’s hard about going into settings and then

General -> VPN -> add configuration and entering

- Server

- remote ID

- Username

- Password

This is less setup than adding an email account.

You have obviously never Worked tech support.

Except an email account is something everyone has to use in the day to day, and getting to that point was a 15 year battle. Go down and work with the IT department sometime, it's incredible the blind spots you'll see. The calrity of your knowledge is far from universal

So who is the set of people who are both technically savvy enough to know they want a VPN but can’t follow the set up instructions I listed above if they were given by a VPN provider?

People with enough technical knowledge to know that they need a VPN to evade something like the Great Firewall, but not with enough technical knowledge to set it up manually.

They may have heard of so-and-so app, install it, and boom, it works. That's very appealing, especially if it's a custom protocol that is supposedly harder to detect.

Or maybe their grandkids have set it up for them, and don't want it to be any harder than it needs to be. Yada yada.

It's not really hard to come up with answers like this. The two options aren't "complete expert" and "blithering idiot".

There are many configurations you cannot do via the Settings UI. Want to auto-connect / connect on demand? iOS supports this but not in the UI. For me it is important that if the VPN disconnects, the system will reconnect instead of silently using no VPN for all my traffic.

Because many users of VPNs are doing so to bypass country detection.

I regularly jump between UK, US and France in my VPN app.

I think to try to use techniques to prevent the GFW from killing the connection.

The easiest way would simply be for their website to template out a .mobileconfig. It’s just xml, it’d be relatively painless, even more so than trying to fill in the settings yourself.

The only sensible reasons I could see for an app are either to deliver the content to the user in the manner the user is most accustomed to, or to be able to integrate billing as in-app subscriptions, etc.

Setting up a VPN in settings works just fine, for that one server. I use NordVPN for example, and they allow me to pick from a ton of servers in any country on the fly, which would be nearly impossible (or very unrealistic) to do with the settings app. It also lets my see the load status and distance of various servers.

VPN is just a generic term for accessing all of the internet. The software used is much more complex (hiding from the Great Firewall) (shadowsocks for instance)

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