Google announced today that Google One’s VPN feature will be shut down over the next few months. According to Google, it’s “sunsetting the VPN feature because we’ve found that people just weren’t using it much,” and retiring it will let the team “refocus” and “support more of the popular features people use Google One for.” The free Pixel VPN that ships with Pixel phones is unaffected — Google committed to five years of availability for it at launch.
The feature was originally marketed as adding “an extra layer of online protection” for Android phones and giving users “peace of mind about their data security.” Google had even published a whitepaper explaining how it worked, had the system independently audited by a third party, and open-sourced the client API.