Opera for Android: How to Configure the Built-In VPN

One of the key selling points of the Opera browser on Android is the built-in VPN functionality. With this feature, you’re able to hide your IP address and online activity securely. You can also change your apparent location to appear to be in “America”, “Asia”, or “Europe”.

A VPN or Virtual Private Network is a tool that uses an encrypted network connection to securely tunnel your browsing data through a VPN server. This prevents your online activity from being monitored as the monitor would only see encrypted data between your device and the VPN server which would be unreadable without the encryption key. VPNs also change your apparent IP address to that of the VPN server. This can allow you to appear to be in another location, potentially allowing you to bypass geo-restrictions, grating access to location locked content.

Opera’s built-in VPN can be configured from within the in-app settings. To be able to access the in-app settings, first tap the Opera icon in the bottom-right corner of the app.

Next, tap “Settings” at the bottom of the popup pane to open the settings.

In the settings, tap the slider for the second option “VPN” to the “On” position to enable the VPN. To configure the VPN settings, you will need to tap on the “VPN” label.

In the VPN settings, there are three options. The first checkbox is used to configure if the VPN applies to all tabs if disabled, or exclusively to private tabs if enabled.

The next setting is the Virtual location, which is the location of the VPN server. You have four options, “Optimal” chooses the fastest option, and should be used unless you want to appear in a certain region. The regions you can choose between are “America”, “Asia”, and “Europe”.

The last option is “Bypass VPN for search”. This will avoid using the VPN to connect to search engines so that you can keep getting location-relevant and language-specific search results.

Tip: These options are only visible when the VPN slider is enabled.