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An iPhone VPN has two parts: the service and the app. Most rankings only look at the service. This one also weighs what iOS users report in the App Store every month — crashes, connection drops, battery drain, and the auto-renew traps that generate the loudest complaints — because a great VPN with a bad iOS app is a bad iPhone VPN.
Private Internet Access67 The healthiest iOS app in this month's App Store analysis: the lowest critical-complaint rate of any major provider, no billing-trap flag, and open-source code so the app can be checked as well as the service.
Proton VPN76 Swiss, non-profit-controlled, open source, audited — and the iOS app has become one of the most stable, with strong Always-On VPN support and a free tier that lets you keep it installed for hotel Wi-Fi at no cost.
ExpressVPN72 The most polished iOS app of the group and the one that reconnects fastest after a network change, which is the moment most VPN apps fail on a phone.
Open-source apps, court-proven no-logs, unlimited devices; US-based and Kape-owned.
67
Owner
Kape Technologiesalso owns review sites
Jurisdiction
United States · Five Eyes
No-logs audit
Deloitte, 2022 (report not public)
Price
from $2.03/mo · renewal price unconfirmed
Runs oniOSAndroidMacWindowsLinuxRouterBrowserTV
The healthiest iOS app in this month's App Store analysis: the lowest critical-complaint rate of any major provider, no billing-trap flag, and open-source code so the app can be checked as well as the service. Unlimited devices means your iPad and Mac are covered too, and the court-tested no-logs record matters more than the US address to most iPhone users.
US jurisdiction and Kape ownership. If those are dealbreakers, the next two picks are not.
Swiss, non-profit-controlled, open source, with the only free tier worth using.
76
Owner
Proton Foundation
Jurisdiction
Switzerland · Outside the alliances
No-logs audit
None — apps audited by Securitum, 2025
Price
from $4.49/mo
Runs oniOSAndroidMacWindowsLinuxRouterBrowserTV
Swiss, non-profit-controlled, open source, audited — and the iOS app has become one of the most stable, with strong Always-On VPN support and a free tier that lets you keep it installed for hotel Wi-Fi at no cost. The recent App Store sentiment trend is positive, which is rarer than it should be in this category.
Speeds trail the top two on most connections; Secure Core in particular is slow by design.
App quality
68
Privacy & trust
73
Price & renewal
77
Features
98
Controlled by a Swiss non-profit foundation since 2024
All apps open source and independently audited
Free tier with no data cap and no ads
Renewal is higher than the intro price
Free tier cannot choose a country
Speeds trail NordVPN and ExpressVPN in most tests
Lab test pending — scored on public dataiOS app score 68/100 from 101,311 ratingsFull reviewVisit Proton VPN
Polished apps and reliable unblocking; owned by Kape, which also owns three review sites.
72
Owner
Kape Technologiesalso owns review sites
Jurisdiction
British Virgin Islands · Outside the alliances
No-logs audit
KPMG, 2023 (report not public)
Price
from $4.99/mo · ~$7.08/mo over 3 yrs after renewal
Runs oniOSAndroidMacWindowsLinuxRouterBrowserTV
The most polished iOS app of the group and the one that reconnects fastest after a network change, which is the moment most VPN apps fail on a phone. Lightway is light on battery. It works in China and the UAE without settings changes, which matters if the iPhone is the device you travel with.
Highest price on this page, and it is Kape-owned; billing complaints are above our flag threshold this month.
Unlimited devices at the lowest headline price of the big three; same owner as NordVPN.
71
Owner
Nord Security
Jurisdiction
Netherlands · Nine Eyes
No-logs audit
Deloitte, 2025 (report not public)
Price
from $2.19/mo · ~$4.41/mo over 3 yrs after renewal
Runs oniOSAndroidMacWindowsLinuxRouterBrowserTV
The cheapest two-year intro among the majors with unlimited devices, and an iOS app that scores well on speed praise in reviews. If the household has three iPhones and two iPads, this is the value pick.
Billing and auto-renew complaints are above our threshold; the renewal price is roughly three times the intro. Cancel in iOS Settings, not the app, and set a reminder.
App quality
66
Privacy & trust
58
Price & renewal
77
Features
89
Unlimited simultaneous connections
Cheapest two-year intro among the major brands
Deloitte no-logs audit (2023) and Cure53 app audits
Renewal is about three times the intro price
Owned by Nord Security, which also owns NordVPN
Netherlands base sits inside the Nine Eyes
Lab test pending — scored on public dataiOS app score 66/100 from 128,114 ratingsFull reviewVisit Surfshark
Canadian, founder-owned, with a generous free tier and unusually flexible pricing.
66
Owner
Windscribe Limited
Jurisdiction
Canada · Five Eyes
No-logs audit
None found
Price
from $5.75/mo
Runs oniOSAndroidMacWindowsLinuxRouterBrowserTV
The best free iOS VPN that is not Proton: 10 GB a month, no ads, founder-owned. The paid app is solid and the R.O.B.E.R.T. blocker cuts tracker traffic system-wide, which on an iPhone has a visible effect on battery.
The lowest-scoring iOS app in our analysis by a wide margin, with over half of recent reviews raising a critical problem. Fine as a China backup on a laptop; not an iPhone VPN.
No independent audit, P2P blocked, and a sibling brand fined for selling browsing data. The App Store score is middling, and the first-year price doubles at renewal.
What we weighed for iPhone, and the exact weights
App quality from real reviews
We analyse the most recent App Store reviews of every app monthly and score stability, sentiment and complaint rate. This is a direct measure of how the app behaves on iOS, not how it is described.
Ownership and audits
iOS sandboxing limits what an app can do to your device, but it does nothing about what the company can do with your traffic. Who owns it and when it was last audited still comes first.
Price after renewal
Subscriptions bought through the App Store renew automatically at the full price. We score on what the plan costs over three years, not the intro price.
iOS-specific features
On-demand connection rules, a working kill switch (Always-On VPN), Siri Shortcuts, widgets, and split tunnelling where iOS allows it.
Weights on this page: App quality 30% · Privacy & trust 22% · Price & renewal 15% · Features 10% · Streaming 8% · Censorship bypass 5% · Speed (our tests) 5% · Support & refunds 5%. Formula.
What makes an iPhone VPN different
iOS restricts what any app can do, which is mostly good news. A VPN app cannot see other apps’ traffic except through the system tunnel, cannot run indefinitely in the background, and cannot install a kill switch the way a desktop app can. Instead it hands the tunnel to iOS and asks the system to maintain it. Whether the developer used those APIs well is the difference between an app that quietly stays connected all day and one that drops every time you walk out of Wi-Fi range.
That is why this page weighs App Store review analysis at 30% — the highest of any list on the site. We pull the newest reviews of every app on the first of the month, tag what they complain about, and score each app. The full method is on the iPhone rankings page, including this month’s numbers for every app.
The three settings that matter on iOS
Always-On / on-demand. Every pick above supports iOS’s on-demand VPN rules, which reconnect the tunnel when the network changes without the app being open. Turn this on. It is the closest thing iOS has to a kill switch: with it enabled, iOS will not pass traffic outside the tunnel while the VPN is meant to be up.
Protocol. WireGuard (or a provider’s own build of it — NordLynx, Lightway) uses far less battery than OpenVPN and reconnects in under a second. Leave it on automatic unless you are in a censored country, where you will need the obfuscated option.
Split tunnelling. iOS does not allow per-app split tunnelling in the way Android does. Some providers offer it for specific domains or for Safari only; do not choose a VPN for iPhone on the basis of a split tunnelling feature that the platform will not let it deliver.
The complaints iPhone users make most
Across every app we track, the pattern is the same: billing and auto-renew first, connection drops second, then crashes after an iOS update. The billing complaints are almost all the same story — a free trial that converted, or a yearly plan that renewed — and almost all of them could be avoided by knowing that App Store subscriptions are cancelled in iOS Settings, not in the app. The providers do not make this obvious because they have no incentive to. We do.
Free VPNs on the App Store
The App Store’s VPN category is full of free apps with hundreds of thousands of ratings and no identifiable company behind them. Several have been found bundling analytics SDKs that collect precisely what a VPN is supposed to hide. The two free tiers we are willing to recommend are Proton VPN (no data cap, no ads, no country choice) and Windscribe (10 GB a month, no ads). If a free VPN app is not one of those, assume you are the product.
iPhone app rating is far below every established provider in this catalogue
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a VPN on my iPhone?
On your home Wi-Fi and mobile data, rarely — iOS already encrypts most app traffic with TLS, and Apple's own Private Relay hides your IP from websites in Safari if you pay for iCloud+. A VPN earns its place on public Wi-Fi, when you want to change your apparent country for streaming or travel, when you are in a censored country, or when you do not want your ISP or carrier to see which domains you visit. If none of those apply, the answer is no, whatever the ads say.
Is Apple's iCloud Private Relay a VPN?
No. It only covers Safari and some app traffic, only hides your IP from websites (Apple and a partner each see half the picture), cannot change your country, and cannot be used for streaming or censorship bypass. It is a good privacy feature and a poor VPN substitute.
Why does my iPhone VPN keep disconnecting?
Usually because iOS suspended the app in the background and the VPN profile did not reconnect. Turn on the app's Always-On or on-demand setting so the system, not the app, keeps the tunnel up. If it still drops on cellular, switch to a UDP protocol (WireGuard/Lightway/NordLynx) — carriers throttle some TCP tunnels. Connection drops are the second most common complaint across all iPhone VPN reviews we analyse.
How do I cancel a VPN subscription bought on iPhone?
Settings → your name → Subscriptions → the VPN → Cancel. Deleting the app does not cancel it, and the provider's own website usually cannot cancel an App Store subscription. Refunds go through reportaproblem.apple.com, not the VPN company. Billing surprises are the single most common complaint in the reviews we analyse, and nearly all of them come down to this.
Does a VPN drain iPhone battery?
A little: expect 3–8% more drain over a day with WireGuard-family protocols, more with OpenVPN. The apps with the fewest battery complaints in our review analysis are ExpressVPN and Proton VPN. Tracker-blocking features (Windscribe's R.O.B.E.R.T., NordVPN's Threat Protection) can offset it by cutting background ad traffic.
Can I use a VPN on iPhone in China?
Yes, but only with providers that have obfuscated protocols, and only if you install them before you arrive — the Chinese App Store does not list them. See the China guide for the working list and the pre-travel checklist.
