We’re always making small and big changes—some that aren’t so visible. Here are three recently added features to our ExpressVPN apps that might be easy to miss:
1. Refresh button
When your VPN connection seems to not be running as smoothly as you’d expect, you can try using the Refresh button—which looks like a “reload” symbol and is located next to your VPN IP address on your ExpressVPN home screen for iOS and Android. This initiates a reconnection of the VPN to see if the situation improves. The best thing about it is you don’t ever lose VPN protection, even for a moment.
2. Choose your Lightway encryption cipher
The ExpressVPN app now lets you choose a different encryption cipher for our Lightway protocol. Lightway is the VPN protocol we built from the ground up, and most of our users are using it.
AES-256-GCM is the current standard for symmetric encryption and can be accelerated by special hardware found in modern processors (such as those from Intel, AMD, and Apple) to run extremely fast. However, with lower-cost devices, AES-256 can actually be very slow, as their processors do not have this hardware acceleration. For devices with this problem, ChaCha20 is able to provide high performance and high security encryption, as it is optimized to run in-software.
Lightway encryption cipher selection is now available on the ExpressVPN app for iOS, Android, and Windows. Go to your app’s protocol settings and you’ll see “Advanced options” under Lightway UDP and TCP.
3. Lightway NAT heartbeats: Ensure timely message retrieval
In rare cases, push notifications might be delayed when your device is temporarily inactive, causing the VPN tunnel to go idle. (Yes, the VPN remains active with full protection.) By enabling NAT heartbeats, small data packets keep the tunnel active, ensuring instant messages.
The increased activity does mean that this feature would consume more of your battery power. It’s available on our apps for iOS and Android. Go to your app’s protocol settings and you’ll see “Advanced options” under Lightway UDP and TCP.