Quote from Proton VPN:
Google has known about a bug that breaks VPN apps for 7 months, leaving users exposed with no warning or error, just a VPN app that stopped working in the background.
If you’re using ANY VPN on Android, you can help us by getting Google’s attention to fix it.
We first reported this bug to Google in September 2025.
Others like Mullvad and Wireguard reported it even earlier, in August.
Google’s response? “I don’t see anything unusual.”
The bug corrupts Android’s network stack at the system level after a VPN update, causing users to blame their VPN provider.
Restarting the app doesn’t help, with the only fix being a full device reboot or VPN app reinstall, something which most users never figure out.
This affects several VPN providers on Android 16, and only Google has the access to diagnose it properly.
After 7 months of waiting, we’re now asking publicly: Google, when are you fixing this?
Issue Tracker Links:
This is basically like watching the enshittification of our Android devices live
Shit like this is the reason I’ve given money to mobile Linux projects
Hell yeah, thanks for donating! For anyone else reading, I’d suggest donating to PostmarketOS, if you have the means. They’re doing extremely good work building the foundation we’ll be able to use to escape Android and google forever.
I’m just curious how I’ll manage to get to my second factor app for my bank to run.
A lot of bank apps actually work fine on Graphene, there’s a list of working ones here: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/
Nice, both my bank and Wero are listed. Do you think this can be adapted for postmarket?
It’s possible that the android app could be run through a compatibility layer such as waydroid, but that would need separate testing to confirm if the app is compatible.
Just tested on postmarketOS and both Aegis and my bank app work fine through waydroid. My bank alerts that my phone is somehow modified and that I should be careful.
So I guess they do detect it, but some banks may or may not allow you to use their app in that case. (My app works on graphene too btw)
Woah! Thanks for testing that! :D
Be sure to check out that comment @SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
If that bank does not have an alternate way to 2FA, see if another bank does. They just want you to have an app dependency so they can harvest everything you do, everywhere you go, and sell it.
Banks will have to adapt when they realize people won’t play their games anymore. At the end of the day, they like money, and will follow it.
I’m sure this will happen but I also know that we will be the first adopters so we will have to figure out how to communicate our wishes.
Wireguard on Linux can’t even autostart with the system.