Android 17 is giving you a powerful VPN feature for free

Android 17 is giving you a powerful VPN feature for free

https://www.phonearena.com/news/android-17-has-a-powerful-vpn-feature-for-free_id179227

Publish Date: 2026-03-27 11:47:00

Source Domain: www.phonearena.com

Today, Google has announced Android 17 Beta 3, and with it come a lot of new features, tools, and bug fixes. One new feature being introduced is a very interesting tool that has, until now, only really been possible if you used certain VPN apps, sometimes requiring you to be on a paid plan as well.

Android 17 brings VPN split tunneling for apps

With Beta 3, Google has brought split tunneling to Android as a system-level functionality. As such, the full release of Android 17 will almost certainly feature this tool as well.Previously, you had to use a VPN from a very small list of providers that had split tunneling built into their respective apps. For some of these VPN apps, split tunneling was a paid feature, for others, it was a feature with limited bandwidth allowance each month. Some VPN apps required both a paid plan and also limited how much bandwidth you could get for split tunneling.
The one disadvantage to how split tunneling is being implemented in Android 17 is that VPN providers will have to code their apps to access the feature themselves. If the VPN app that you use doesn’t do so, you will still have to find another VPN app.

What is split tunneling?

Not all apps need a VPN connection. | Image by PhoneArena

Split tunneling is one of the most useful features a VPN can have, even though it’s not that well known among users. It doesn’t help that this is also a feature that is usually hidden in the more advanced settings of a VPN app.

What split tunneling does is it allows you to basically choose which apps have to use the VPN connection and which ones are excluded. This lets you keep your VPN app running all the time, only affecting the apps that you want to use a VPN connection for while using everything else as normal.

An example of an excellent new feature

Sometimes Google…

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