iOS 11 Control Center Needs a VPN Button

You can take photos, turn on the iPhone flash light, control your Apple TV, and turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth from iOS 11’s Control Center, but you can’t enable your VPN. How is that still not an option?

Control Center in iOS 11 could be even more useful if there was a VPN button

Control Center is a feature that groups together commonly used settings and features for quick access. It’s customizable so you can see what you want, assuming they’re available options in the Control Center settings.

A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, creates an encrypted tunnel to protect you web browsing, email, and other online activity from prying eyes. I always use a VPN service when I’m on public Wi-Fi so no one can eavesdrop on my activity and potentially steal personal data.

Picking out a VPN service isn’t as simple as finding the cheapest price. You’ll need to do a little research to decide which is best for you, and you can check out the services the TMO staff uses to get an idea of where to start.

Once I join a Wi-Fi network on my iPhone or iPad I have to make a trip to Settings and enable my VPN. If it’s a network I previously joined, that typically involves leaving Safari, jumping back to the first page of my Home screen, and then launching Settings so I can tap the VPN toggle.

I’m on public networks a lot, so those taps and swipes add up. I’d much prefer to swipe down on my iPhone X screen and tap a VPN button. That’s simple, convenient, and still surprisingly missing from Control Center on our iPhones and iPads.

As long as I’m asking for new features, I’d also love the option to remember my VPN setting when I rejoin a network. I always use my VPN at the coffee shop, so auto-enabling it when I join their network would be awesome. Sure, I can sort of do that in my VPN service’s app settings, but it would be great to have that as a system-level option, too.

It seems too late to see a Control Center VPN button in iOS 11, so maybe iOS 12? I’ll keep dreaming.

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