Windscribe

Windscribe is a commercial VPN service, and this is its Android app. Unlike the general-purpose clients on this site, it connects to Windscribe’s own servers and needs a Windscribe account, which you can create inside the app. F-Droid flags it NonFreeNet: “App is bound to the Windscribe VPN service, which itself is not libre.”

Protocols and features

• Six protocols: OpenVPN UDP, OpenVPN TCP, IKEv2, WireGuard, and two for restrictive networks: Stealth, which wraps OpenVPN in a TLS tunnel, and WSTunnel, which carries OpenVPN over a WebSocket. You can also import your own WireGuard or OpenVPN configurations.
• Split tunnelling by app: choose which apps use the VPN.
• R.O.B.E.R.T., Windscribe’s DNS filtering. The free plan includes the malware and ads blocklists.
• Network auto-detection, which reacts to the Wi-Fi network you join and needs location access; that is why the app asks for location, in the background too.
• GPS spoofing: if you choose Windscribe as the mock location app in Developer options, it can set the phone’s location to match the server.
• Always-on VPN needs Android 8 or later, and reconnecting automatically after a restart needs Android 9.

What goes online

Besides the VPN connection itself, the app talks to Windscribe’s servers. It reports a new installation once, and checks for app updates once every 24 hours; in this build, the update prompt points to F-Droid or Windscribe’s website. Windscribe’s privacy policy says it keeps your total data transferred in a 30-day period and the time of your last activity, and does not store a “historical record of VPN sessions”, your source IP or the sites you visit.

The licence question

The project’s licensing is unclear, and we report it as it stands: the repository’s LICENSE file is the GPL version 2, F-Droid lists the app as GPL-3.0, and the README’s licence section says “All rights reserved. This project is proprietary software developed by Windscribe Limited.” F-Droid builds and distributes it from the source code as free software.

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s build of version 4.3, compiled from the source code and signed with F-Droid’s key. F-Droid’s recipe deletes a prebuilt in-app purchasing library and compiles Windscribe’s networking library from its own source rather than using the prebuilt copy. The project describes this F-Droid variant as having “No proprietary Google dependencies”, no payment processing and no push notifications.
• It can’t update the Google Play version (“Windscribe: Fast & Secure VPN”) or Windscribe’s own APK, or be updated by them, without uninstalling first. F-Droid no longer builds Windscribe’s separate Android TV app.
• The language menu offers Portuguese (Portugal) rather than Brazilian Portuguese, and many strings in the Brazilian translation are still in English.
• The 96.7 MB file runs on Android 7.0 and later, on ARM and x86, 32- and 64-bit, and declares 22 permissions, including location and mock location for the features above. Our scan found no trackers.

Flagged by F-Droid:

• NonFreeNet: Relies on or promotes a proprietary network service.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.