Touch VPN Review

As competition for virtual private network providers or VPNs has heated up on the modern internet, some providers have moved into specialized niches. A VPN is meant to protect your location and internet traffic from outside viewers, preserving your privacy. TouchVPN has attained popularity as a free solution (although it does have paid service tiers) particularly favored by mobile users. In this review, we’ll be looking at how Touch VPN delivers on the most important features of a modern VPN service.

Pros & Cons of Touch VPN

Key Features of Touch VPN

Navigating the various features and extras associated with VPN services can be challenging for the average consumer. To get to the heart of what’s most important, and to allow useful comparisons, we focus on the four key features of a genuinely up-to-date VPN:

• Security and privacy are the core missions of a VPN, and a modern VPN service should have a no-logging privacy policy as a standard (meaning that the company can’t log information about your internet traffic and browsing habits to sell to third parties or hand over to law enforcement or government agencies).
• Server coverage is essential if you want to enjoy a consistent connection to your VPN service and decent speeds. The easier it is to access servers in a geographical location close to you, the more stable your VPN will be, and a server network that spreads the traffic load across many different servers will optimize performance across the board.
• Performance is partly a measure of the speed at which your VPN can be expected to operate — most VPNs involve at least a small trade-off in download and upload speeds — but also includes whether the VPN has monthly data limits and the number of devices you can connect to it.
• Price determines the value for money your VPN service delivers when weighed against its features, performance and security. Even a free service may not prove to be desirable if it exposes users to significant risk or shoddy practices.

We evaluated Touch VPN in each of these four categories. Here’s what we discovered.

Security & Privacy

Touch VPN has some attractive security and privacy features. As a free service, it doesn’t collect user information for registration purposes. The app is extremely easy to download and use for mobiles or browsers. However, its claim to be able to secure your desktop devices isn’t really accurate, as its compatibility with Windows and Mac only applies to browsers running in those environments, it doesn’t have a full-fledged desktop app, and it employs industry-standard AES-256 encryption. Unfortunately, Touch VPN also has some noteworthy potential privacy drawbacks. It lacks a kill switch, a feature most VPNs have that ensures your internet connection is cut if your VPN should drop for any reason. More significant than this, however, is its logging policy. Most modern companies have a no-logging policy. Touch VPN, which operates under the larger umbrella of the Pango company and shares its privacy policy, does not quite have the same standard. Among other things, it collects detailed device information (including unique device identifiers), it registers your IP address and your “approximate” location, and it may gather your personal information from referrals and third parties. Pango claims not to track any internet activity you engaged in while connected to the VPN and to anonymize whatever data it does collect so that it can’t be connected to any specific session or user. In addition, it claims to use its logs only in aggregate form, to not collate any specific browsing data in any way with your device identifiers and IP address and to use this data strictly for improving your security and delivering better service. Certainly, this looks like an improvement over Touch VPN’s older privacy policy, which was frank about selling user information to third parties as part of its revenue model, but it’s worth noting that the substantiveness of Pango’s privacy claims has not been tested by a third-party audit. It’s ultimately up to the individual user to decide whether to believe them or not.

Sever Coverage

Touch VPN offers a server network comprising 5,900 servers in over 90 countries. This is more than adequate network coverage, and part of the VPN’s popularity lies in the fairly reliable speed and performance that this network delivers. It’s certainly reliable enough in that it does indeed mask user locations and allow access to regionally protected services that wouldn’t normally be possible. It delivers this functionality fairly seamlessly, is noted for its stability — especially given its being a free service — and the lack of a true no-logging policy mentioned above doesn’t appear to have much noticeable impact from a daily-use standpoint.

Performance

TouchVPN doesn’t allow multiple device connections but does provide unlimited data and consistently performs well on speed tests, typically not exceeding 20% speed loss for downloads and faring even better for average upload speeds. Older versions could sometimes experience inconsistent speeds due to much less extensive coverage than the network enjoys today, but currently, Touch VPN seems to perform quite consistently. Unfortunately, it doesn’t unblock streaming services or provide access to torrenting, two major functions that are common to most VPNs and which are indeed common reasons for people to even utilize a VPN.

Price

TouchVPN is free software that presents at least the appearance of fulfilling the most basic functions of a VPN while being extremely easy to use. This makes it worthwhile if you’re a user who doesn’t need it for entertainment applications like streaming or torrenting, and particularly if you’re confident in parent company Pango’s assurances that the many kinds of data being collected by the VPN won’t compromise your privacy. If you’re not confident in those assurances or would rather see them independently verified before putting your privacy on the line, you’ll want to explore other options.

Touch VPN Overview

Touch VPN is a fast, easy-to-use and free service that’s very no-frills but popular with the mobile users who are its primary market. We break down its basic overall traits below.

What Customers Are Saying

Users generally like Touch VPN: “Just started using this TouchVPN. I hope it stays free as it works great for web browsing. I’m not sure it will hold up for big file transfers but for free, this gets the job done in at great fashion!” Another user notes, “Been using the app for more than a year now and haven’t had any problems with it. Love it!”