SuperVPN may be free, but the app’s permissions raise a lot of red flags.
SuperVPN Free VPN Client is a hugely popular free VPN app for Android. Its Google Play page reports more than 100 million installs, and as we write it has a 4.6 rating from approaching a million users.
You can install and use the app for free, and there are no restrictions for the first 20 days (although you will see lots of ads). After that, VPN sessions are automatically disconnected after 60 minutes. You can start a new session with a tap.
The free service limits your locations to France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Singapore, UK, Canada and the US.
A VIP account adds Hong Kong and apparently gets you access to faster servers.
Prices starts at $5 for a single month, falling to $2.86 on the annual plan (which is actually $60 to cover 21 months, as you get nine for free.) That’s not bad, but keep in mind that it just covers a single Android device. Surfshark’s two-year plan costs $1.99 to cover up to five, and that can include any mix of PCs, Macs, Android and iOS devices.
Free VPN apps aren’t generally a good choice for privacy as there’s usually little data on who runs them, or what they might be doing with your information. Would SuperVPN Free VPN Client be different, we wondered? Ah, no.
The developer is listed as SuperSoftTech, but it doesn’t have a website. Its address seems to be on the campus of the National University of Singapore, and the only point of email contact is a Gmail address.
Searching online for that address suggests it belonged to Jinrong Zheng, the developer responsible for LinkVPN and several other apps. A little more searching finds a page about the app, with the goanalyticsapp.gmail.com email, and an address in Beijing.
There is a privacy policy, but it looks like it’s been cobbled together in minutes by someone who isn’t a native English speaker, and has just tried to assemble some approximately correct sentences to reassure people.
