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Comment by kmfrk | Hacker News Reader

It's weird how, as popular as VPNs are, competing on UX - and not just some cute mascotts and assets - is still not a huge priority.

There's always trade-offs to be made for now it seems. And Mullvad doesn't have mobile support yet.

Makes you wonder what's gonna happen when Cloudflare's Warp is out of closed beta.

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Back in the day, every videocard manufacturer released their own drivers. Diamond, Canopus, BFG, etc, they all took the baseline GPU drivers and added their custom branding. This meant that after Nvidia released a new driver, it could take weeks before Diamond put it up on their website. You missed out on bugfixes and optimizations for new games. So everybody just used Nvidia's drivers, and eventually all the various companies stopped doing it entirely.

Mobile VPN apps are in the same spot. They all use the same backends; OpenVPN, IKEv2, and/or Wireguard. Everybody's time would be best spent making _those_ apps better. The OpenVPN iOS app has a particularly poor UX.

For example on iOS you use the iOS NEVPNManager API for setting up an IKEv2 VPN connection, if this is updated in an iOS release and you use it in your VPN app, your app will be "updated" too. So in this sense it's not comparable with videocard drivers from back in the day.

That's true, IKEv2 is natively supported. OpenVPN and wireguard aren't, and most of the paid services use OpenVPN right now.

Was it a long time since you tried Mullvad? They revamped their UX making it easier to use not that long ago. And I use Mullvad on my phone following their instructions how to do so. This makes your post a bit confusing.

No mobile app.

But they don't need any additional mobile app, It's as simple as installing wireguard and scanning the QR code from the website and it just works.

Thad like saying Netflix doesn't have Internet support because they haven't created their own web browser. It's just a confusing thing to say.

How difficult is it to download and open a .ovpn file?

Mullvad has mobile support with WireGuard.

That's what I'm trying to do with WifiMask VPN, the apps are an important piece of the puzzle to make VPN as simple and clear to use as possible for the normal user. For now there's an app for macOS and iOS. A simple on/off button is the center of the design, with not too much bells and whistles. The focus is ease, security, stability and speed.

The big issue with VPN UX for me are all the ways that you can end up accidentally disabling your VPN, because it's not clear under which conditions it shuts down, is closed, or is temporarily inactive, which isn't good enough if you need 100% uptime for full protection.

Killswitches are the probably the easiest way to deal with it, because it will also alert users to when something is misbehaving, but it obviously doesn't work for general use cases so better UX is needed beyond the protective design.

With my WifiMask apps it's the case as long as the on/off switch is turned on, the VPN will either be connected or try to connect, as long as there is no connection the kill switch will do it's work, prevent data leaking and the app will show what's going on. Only manually turning off the switch will disable the VPN and any data leaking protections. I can still do some improvements here and there to show more information on what's going on, so this is useful feedback to me, thanks.

> And Mullvad doesn't have mobile support yet.

You mean (I think) it doesn't have it's own native app. Connecting to Mullvad's VPN works fine on Android using OVPN (as do many of the VPN providers).

Sent via LineageOS using Mullvad :P

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