Android improvements (country names, profiles, metrics, random connections)
A posted this on reddit, but I figured I'd put it here as well.
I've been a longtime user of ProtonMail and ProtonVPN and am incredibly grateful of everything they've done to make privacy accessible to more people. I also really love the new ProtonMail app. But ProtonVPN has problems.
To some it up, it seems like functionality has been sacrificed for vague aesthetics.
Specifics:
1. The name of the country you are connected to is in tiny text down near the bottom of the screen. This is even worse if you are connected to the "fastest country". Instead most of the screens real estate is dedicated to a gray globe like map with the country you are in unlabeled, so unless you are geography wiz, it's hard to tell where you're located at a glance.
2. Profiles have been wrecked. I know they've been replaced by recents, but that's far less obvious and the connection defaults for whatever you have set in settings. As someone paying over $500 dollars a year to Proton, I don't want a simple basic VPN, I want granular control so I can have different profiles for different purposes.
3. The performance metrics for a server are no longer easily visible. I have to click into a separate screen to see server load and speed.
4. What happened to random connections? Why is fastest server so prominent? If you're using a VPN chances are you don't want to appear in your home country, yet your home country will almost always be the fastest. Switching to other servers now has extra steps.
I appreciate the effort to keep the app fresh and improve user experience, but I feel like we've gone backwards in a lot of ways. I don't mean to rant and I don't want to sound to critical, because I love this company, but I think these are real annoyances that make the user experience for more sophisticated users much worse.
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a commented
I vote critical because of point 4. Without this option ProtonVPN is (most probably) revealing my location by default. This is unacceptable.