Cloudflare adds VPN features to 1.1.1.1 privacy app

As promised in April, Cloudflare has finally launched Warp, a consumer mobile privacy app that looks a lot like a VPN without actually being one.

That sounds confusing so let’s start by describing the service itself, which can be accessed via a free Android and iOS app called Warp, and a $4.99 per month subscription app called Warp+.

The first, Warp, is a development of the 1.1.1.1 service and mobile apps launched in 2018 as an alternative DNS resolver that headlined on the theme of privacy – i.e. we don’t log the sites you visit.

More recently, the 1.1.1.1 app added support for the emerging encrypted DNS standards, DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT), which hide the domains people visit from ISPs and anyone else listening in (Mozilla recently integrated this service into Firefox).

Now 1.1.1.1 has become ‘1.1.1.1 with Warp’ by adding the ability to encrypt all traffic from the mobile device and not just DNS queries, hence the similarity to a full VPN.

What does the Warp+ subscription add to this? Despite being limited to one device, the user gets unlimited bandwidth and 30% better performance thanks, Cloudflare says, to Warp+ traffic being routed over its global network in an optimised way.

Note that if you signed up for the Warp waiting list via the 1.1.1.1 app, you also get the chance to try Warp+ free of charge with an initial 10GB of data.

If Warp isn’t a VPN, what is it?

Traditional VPNs route a user’s network traffic to a trusted, internet-connected server, via an encrypted ‘tunnel’. The security benefit of a VPN is that it lets a user send traffic via a provider they trust (the VPN company) while hiding it from others they don’t trust (ISPs, Wi-Fi snoopers and bad actors, which can’t).

The privacy benefit of a VPN is that a user’s traffic appears to originate from the trusted server rather than their own device. The server may be in a different country to the user and some commercial VPNs allow users to choose which country they appear to be browsing from.

This is why VPNs have become a popular way to dodge geographic restrictions placed on streaming content such as Netflix or the BBC.