More than 480 million mobile VPN apps have been downloaded from official app stores for Android and iOS devices in the last 12 months, according to a publication by Top10VPN.
This number is 54% higher than the previous year, which recorded 311 million downloads.
Of the 480 million downloads, 75% were Android VPN app downloads (358.3 million) while 121.9 million iOS VPN apps were downloaded, which is not surprising as Android has a much larger number of users.
“Downloads were highest in Asia-Pacific (APAC), a region that has been hit by political and social unrest over the past 12 months. There were 188 million app downloads there, which was more than double the previous year’s total,” said Simon Migliano, head of research at Top10VPN.
VPN or Proxy? Which one is for me?
The country topping the download charts, according to Migliano, was Indonesia, with Indonesians downloading more than 75.5 million mobile VPN apps, a 111% increase over the previous year.
Next are the USA (75.6 million) and India (57 million), two countries with very many internet users, although their political climate is stable.
Jordan (387%), Kazakhstan (210%), Algeria (205%) and Vietnam (140%) are next. These countries are experiencing political unrest.
According to the Top10VPN publication , 84.3% of the 480 million downloads were for free VPN apps
The most downloaded apps, according to data from the Android and iOS app stores, were TurboVPN (51.3 million), Hotspot Shield (42.8 million) and Betternet (29.9 million).
With mobile VPN app downloads set to hit 1 billion in the next three years, not counting downloads from China, it’s clear that internet users around the world are struggling to restore the eroding freedoms of the internet
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