My wife is traveling for work to China and Qatar in early 2025. She will be flying to the UK first from Canada and changing planes after a brief layover. I was wondering if anyone on Reddit knows what the best vpn for iPhone – free or paid for service?
She has a Mac as well so ideally the vpn would work on all her devices. I use a Samsung without a VPN so I don’t know what is best for her at all and am hoping to get some advice.
She mostly uses her iphone for streaming and apps but when traveling she will need the VPN to work for all her stuff including Gmail, google, probably Facebook/Instagram, and Reddit lol… Anyone know of a good iPhone vpn that works when you change locations internationally especially in highly censored countries?
Thanks a bunch!
China is honestly one of the most difficult places to use a VPN successfully whether on an iphone or otherwise. Their “Great Firewall of China” is no joke. Any VPN someone recommends for China might not actually work once you get there. So I would suggest having a few options installed on your iphone before you go so that if one doesn’t work you might have a back up plan already in place. The ones that I have heard that currently work in China are Astrill VPN, Mullvad VPN, and LetsVPN.
When you’re not in China, the best options for an iPhone in my experience are NordVPN, Express, and Surfshark. When I did my world trip a year ago I had no problem with Nord in any country except for China but because their app is so good I just used LetsVPN while in China and switched back to Nord when I left China. You can choose to pay monthly or yearly so for letsvpn I did the monthly plan while with Nord I paid for 2 years because then they give big discounts.
I don’t recommend ever using a free vpn for an iphone because as they say if you’re not paying for the product then you are the product and you don’t want to F around and find out with your phone and all your personal data getting leaked by some subpar “free” vpn service like Windscribe.
I hope you’re wife has a good trip and finds the right service for her. Definitely be prepared for some troubleshooting because it can be hectic to figure it out once you land in a foreign land like China. I’m happy to answer questions if you have any.
Thank you so much for the detailed reply, really appreciate it. If you had to choose one for China which do you think is best? Also, do any of them work across all countries? I’ll make sure she downloads a few.
Sorry for the additional reply,
I looked at lets vpn via the iphone app store on my wife’s phone but I’m a bit wigged out that it’s all written in Chinese characters. If I download this app will it be in Chinese and is it safe to use?
I used LetsVPN. It worked fine but I didn’t really like the app so that’s why I stopped using it after I left China. It probably works in all countries but I didn’t test it.
Yeah I see what you mean about the app looking a bit daunting being in Chinese characters in the apple app store. But when you download it then it’s in English. I’m not sure how secure it is but it did allow me to get online in China.
Here is what this vpn looks like once you’ve downloaded it and open it on an iphone.
