Why does F-Droid say Proton VPN “has features I might not like”?

F-Droid is a free open source Android app repository. Before it makes any app available on its site, it builds a version of its own, using the publicly available open source code. All the apps on F-Droid have been built by the F-Droid team. This lets the F-Droid team do a very thorough audit of the code.

Sometimes an app may take actions that the user might not be aware of or that might be undesirable from the user’s perspective.

F-Droid labels these as “Anti-Features(new window).”

Some self-explanatory examples of Anti-Features include “Ads” and “Tracking.”

The Proton VPN app has a “NonFreeNet(new window)” Anti-Feature. While the F-Droid team admits this is a vague term, it essentially means that by installing and using the Proton VPN app, you are accessing the Proton VPN service and this service also includes the VPN servers that we make available to our users. In other words, you cannot use our app to connect to the VPN server of another company. This is true of any VPN service.