I have an old phone that has DDG with the free VPN still working fine. The phone does not have a SIM card now for a couple of years. Is this grandfathered in or what? When I first started using DDG it was web browser & VPN, what happened?
I’ve been using DDG since they were just query bangs you could use in Google and I don’t remember them ever offering a VPN service until recently with Privacy Pro, let alone actually be a free VPN provider. You can sign up for Privacy Pro though, and that is also the only VPN that works with DDG App Tracking Protection.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy-pro/vpn/what-is-vpn/
I have it on my old phone. When I first started using DDG they allowed you to switch VPN by selecting which country you wanted to use. I haven’t seen that for a long time. Here are some screenshots of the free VPN. https://imgur.com/a/LGss7QJ
That’s the DDG App Tracking Protection feature, that’s part of the DDG Android browser. It’s uses Android’s VPN connection, but is not an actual VPN. Read more about it here: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/p-app-tracking-protection/is-app-tracking-protection-a-vpn/