Once again, we’d love to help you solve your problem if you emailed us a debug bundle the next time you see this problem or tell us which email you sent your last debug bundle from.
You are the only user we’re hearing that has this problem, so we have no information until you send your logs.
Other VPNs: When switching or dropping between Wi-Fi/cellular, the VPN symbol stays present throughout — suggesting the VPN connection is maintained even if there’s a brief gap in throughput.
Obscura VPN: The VPN symbol drops entirely, and sometimes only reconnects after several seconds. Even while on a single, stable connection, Obscura VPN intermittently stops working.
I think you need to accept that you’re rushing products out (the Android app included) before they’re ready, and that right now the product just isn’t reliable. People would be better off sticking with ProtonVPN, IVPN, or similar.
Ah I see, this is quite a confusing iOS quirk but I’ll try my best to explain what is actually going on.
On iOS the VPN symbol on the top bar briefly appears when the VPN reports that its state has changed to “Connected”. Important to note that the VPN App has to report that this happened, this is not the system automatically detecting anything.
When switching or dropping between Wi-Fi and cellular, most VPN providers don’t report to iOS that there’s an intermittent gap in connection. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection interruption, there always is one.
In fact, you can try this yourself:
Make sure WiFi and Cellular are both connected
Turn on the non-Obscura VPN of your choice in iOS
Start pinging something (like 8.8.8.8) (I use this app)
While that ping is running, turn off WiFi
You’ll start seeing a couple of “Request time-out” entries in the ping logs before things recover: that is the connection being interrupted. The non-Obscura VPN is simply not reporting this interruption to iOS, but that doesn’t mean the interruption didn’t happen.
With Obscura, we decided to always tell iOS when we detect that our connection has recovered, which causes the VPN symbol to flash on the top bar. Other VPNs don’t, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have connection interruptions when switching/dropping between Wi-Fi and cellular (as demonstrated above).
We thought that since there’s always going to be a connection interruption no matter what, it would be nice for the user to know when the connection is fully recovered and usable. On a technical level I believe we set .reasserting when there’s an interruption, which iOS may also use to better manage connection timeouts/congestion/windows at an L4 level (but this is more speculative).
I hope that’s clearer!
It’s on our list for our next server expansion, thanks for the suggestion!
We just use email, it’s a bit simpler and works for us.
I’m once again asking you to tell us through any channel from which email you are sending messages to our support. We have dug through all of our emails and didn’t find anything from you. @davidcollini spends a significant chunk of his time with us carefully reading, triaging, and replying to support emails, and I think this accusation that “support do not reply” is quite unfair without more information.
If there is a genuine lapse in our support replies, we will fix our process. But I hope you see how we cannot fix our process if we don’t have any information about where you’re sending your support requests from.