Starting November 2022, Google will ban VPNs for Android from blocking and diverting advertising. A technical decision, but also an economic one, which could greatly change the market for these fashionable tools.
VPN editors on Android will experience some complications! Indeed, Google recently updated the general conditions of use of its mobile application store and will prohibit, from 1er November 2022, VPNs to block in-app ads. A decision supposed to help fight against both advertising fraud and malware – some do not hesitate to redirect advertising traffic to other servers in order to make money, for example.
VPNs on Android forced to use Google’s API
Developers will absolutely have to use the Programming Interface (API for Application Programming Interface in English) VpnService provided by Google. On his support pagethe firm indicates that “the VPNService class does not allow […] manipulation of ads that may affect the monetization of the application”. In short, VPNs should not block ads within other applications. In addition, their listing on the Play Store should clearly indicate that the developers have indeed used Google’s VPNService API. Finally, they must “encrypt data between device and VPN tunnel endpoint” and “Comply fully with the Developer Program Policies, including ad fraud, permissions, and malware policies”. New rules that could well cause problems for VPNs blocking trackers and advertising content on other applications, and will force them to make some changes.
But this decision raises some concerns. Reda Labdaoui, head of marketing and sales at Blokada – a Swedish publisher of an ad-blocking VPN app – explains on a forum that “Google claims to be cracking down on apps that use the VPN service to track user data or redirect user traffic to earn money from ads. However, these policy changes also apply to apps that use the service to filter traffic locally on the device,” like Blokada v5 and DuckDuckGo in the past. However, the new version of the VPN managed to dodge this problem.