Building the Lightest VPN App We Could

Encryption is table stakes for a VPN. Almost every provider gets that part right. What's harder — and much less talked about — is what the app costs you the other 23 hours a day it's sitting on your home screen.

The stuff nobody puts on the box

A lot of VPN apps ship with things that have nothing to do with routing your traffic: analytics SDKs, ad networks, background services that phone home, bundled "extra" features that quietly poll in the background even when you're disconnected.

None of that shows up in a feature comparison chart. All of it shows up in your battery percentage and your device storage.

What we optimized for

• Small install size. Fewer bundled SDKs means less to download, update, and store.
• Low idle battery drain. When you're disconnected, the app should be doing essentially nothing.
• No background noise. No ad requests, no third-party analytics pinging in the background — which also lines up with our no-logs commitment.
• Fast cold start. One tap to connect should feel instant, not like waiting for a dashboard to load.

Why this is a privacy feature, not just a performance one

Every SDK bundled into an app is a potential data pipeline you didn't agree to. Ad networks and analytics tools are, structurally, tracking infrastructure — regardless of what the privacy policy says about the VPN tunnel itself. Cutting them out isn't just about battery life; it's about making sure the app doing your encrypting isn't also the app doing your profiling.

Lightweight, in other words, isn't a separate goal from private. For us it's the same goal, described two different ways.