Six screens, each with one subject. Below each one is the part most pages leave out: where it stops working, and why. If you only read one section, read the limits.
One control and one fact. Everything else that used to live here was saying the same thing in a different font.
Not the server's address. Yours, as any website would read it, with the country in two letters beside it. Connect and it changes to the server's country. That change is the whole confirmation, and it doubles as a leak check.
Grey is idle, orange is working, lime is up. The old screen printed a word for the same thing, then a subtitle for it, then sent a notification about it. Now the colour says it once.
While it is working, the dial carries a cross. The old app wrote tap again to cancel underneath, which is an instruction standing in for a button.
It says so. There is no retry loop counting up in the corner and no last-known address left on screen dressed up as the current one. A stale address that looks live is worse than a blank, because you would act on it.
The list you choose from, and an unusually strict rule about which numbers it is allowed to show you.
The country is what you are choosing, so it is the title. The server's own identity sits underneath it: a city when the city is actually known, and a number that stays with that server for as long as it exists.
Both figures come from the server itself. A figure that has gone stale is not shown as though it were fresh: the card says it has not been measured, and the server sinks in every sort order until it has been.
Top right of each card. It does not fill in until the change has actually been saved, so a star that lights up means the list is right, not that the tap registered.
The filter row fades at its right edge so it is clear there is more of it. The last chip used to sit half off the screen with nothing to suggest it was there.
It is the server's own published measurement, not a measurement from your phone to that server. Your distance from it matters and is not in that number. Treat it as a way to rank servers against each other, not as a prediction of what you will get.
DNS. The screen with the shortest list of settings and the longest explanation, because this is the part people are most often sold a half-truth about.
Whatever a server would like your phone to use for name lookups is refused, and GMEOW's choice is written into the tunnel instead. This happens on the free plan and on Premium, and there is no switch to turn it off, because a server operator choosing what resolves your names is the thing a tunnel is supposed to prevent.
Lookups go to AdGuard's public resolver, which simply gives no answer for domains it holds as advertising or tracking. Nothing is inserted into your traffic and no certificate is replaced.
Cloudflare's resolver, answering everything. This is what a free account uses, and it is a perfectly reasonable choice on Premium too if you would rather nothing was withheld.
Type an address and the tunnel uses it. Private ranges are rejected before they are saved, because an address on your home network is not reachable from inside a tunnel and would fail in a way that looks like the app breaking.
The resolver is written in as the tunnel is built, so a running tunnel keeps the one it started with. The app says so rather than letting you change a setting that quietly does nothing until next time.
A resolver that is formatted correctly but dead is the cruellest failure here: the tunnel reports success and nothing resolves. So after connecting, the app checks that names still resolve, and if they do not it returns to Cloudflare, reconnects, and tells you what happened.
When it connects by itself, what Android controls rather than us, and one row that is a fact instead of a setting.
Launch it and it starts working, using your last server or a favourite. Nothing to tap.
Any Wi-Fi, and the app says so in those words. Telling one network from another means reading its name, which has required location permission since Android 10, and GMEOW does not ask for your location. A row promising trusted networks would be promising something the app cannot do.
For the walk out of the café, when the phone drops Wi-Fi and picks the network back up somewhere else.
This row opens your phone's always-on VPN screen rather than flipping something of ours. Android is what actually blocks traffic when a tunnel drops, so Android is where the switch belongs. A toggle here would look like GMEOW was enforcing it, and it is not.
Read-only, and the only row on the screen that is. It is the only protocol the server list offers, so presenting it as a choice would be inventing one. It stays visible because you should be able to check what is carrying your traffic.
Everything that is about you rather than about the tunnel, and the short list of servers you have decided to trust.
The tier you are on and the date it runs out, read from the purchase rather than from a note we made when you bought it.
A code becomes a fixed stretch of Premium. No card is asked for, nothing renews, and nothing is stored to charge you with later.
Not against the handset. Sign in on a new phone and the servers you trust are already at the top. They are also the first place the app looks when it needs a fallback, and when auto-connect fires.
It stays on the list marked inactive, so you can see it is a server having a bad day rather than wondering whether you imagined starring it. If it stays down for a week it is removed for good.
Settings → Support → Privacy & Data → Danger Zone. It removes the account and everything stored with it, and clears the copies held on the handset. No email to support, no waiting on us.
They are two separate things and only Google can stop the second one. Cancel in Google Play first, then delete, or the charges continue against an account that no longer exists. The app says this before it asks you to confirm, and only to accounts it applies to.
Four things that happen without being asked for, and are worth knowing about anyway.
When a handshake will not finish, the app goes to the next comparable server on its own. It prefers the same country, then the same plan, and it releases the seat it was holding on the failed server first so nothing is left occupied. You hear about it only if the whole run fails.
Each attempt waits a shorter time now, because there is a next one.
One tunnel free, three on Premium, and the count is checked when a tunnel opens rather than trusted from something stored on the phone. Signing in on a fourth device does not silently push one of the others off.
Closing the app releases the seat.
Which one depends on the server. UDP is usually faster; TCP survives networks that interfere with everything else. The app uses whichever the server you chose offers, and shows you which it is.
No proprietary protocol, no in-house cryptography.
When an attempt fails, the app records the server, the stage it got to and the last line the engine produced. That is what makes a bad server findable instead of a rumour. It is kept for thirty days and it contains nothing about what you were doing.
Listed field by field in the privacy policy.
The old app was near-black with a purple accent. This one is painted from a single reference file, and the page you are reading uses the same one.
The gradient and clouds sit behind every screen, dimmed to a strength that measured safe against small grey text. Behind the dial on Home it runs at full strength, because nothing there is small grey text.
The app opens with a short animation built from its own mark instead of a white square on grey. It runs once, it is under two seconds, and it does not stand between you and the connect button.
Your phone's fingerprint or face check can guard GMEOW itself, so an unlocked phone in someone else's hand is not also an open account screen. It uses the sensor your phone already trusts.
Free and Premium differ in the share of the server list you can reach, where those servers sit in the ranking, how many tunnels you can hold at once, and which DNS resolver answers your queries. Everything else on this page is identical on both.
A tunnel is a specific tool with specific limits. Anyone selling you one as a cloak of invisibility is selling you something else.
A tunnel changes the address a website sees. It does nothing about the account you signed into, the cookies already on your phone, the way your browser is configured, or anything you type. If you log in as yourself, you are yourself.
Some streaming platforms, banks and government sites refuse traffic that arrives from a data centre. That is their decision about the exit you came out of, and no plan here can undo it. Nothing on this site claims otherwise.
Some of the servers you can connect through are run by other people. The tunnel between your phone and the exit is encrypted either way, and the resolver override applies either way. What differs is who operates the machine your traffic leaves from, which is set out plainly in the terms.
Blocking traffic when a tunnel drops is Android's job and only Android can do it properly. The app takes you to that setting rather than offering a switch of its own that could not keep the promise.
Filtering happens when a name is looked up, so it works across the phone rather than only in a browser. It cannot touch an advert served from the same domain as the content around it, because there is no separate name to refuse. Expect fewer adverts, not none.
The server list is rebuilt on a schedule and changes on its own. A country available today may not be tomorrow. That is why no number is printed on this page as though it were a specification.
That is a normal outcome and the app is built for it. There is no trial clock in the free plan and no advert waiting to appear once you settle in.
Download on Google Play