I know there is a question pretty much every other week about what VPN to use for the Shield. But my question is how come we cannot enable the native VPN software that comes with Android builds?
For example on any of my Android phones, there is a native VPN setup option that I can use to connect to a VPN. How come this option isn’t exposed as part of the Shield Android TV builds?
Probably because what legal reason would NVIDIA itself want to support VPNs natively as a feature in their product?
To promote bypassing streaming services country content restrictions for the same services they allow or get paid to have or their product?
They can’t enable it, support it and at the same time say it’s none of their business what you do with it on their product
Just a few days ago I was trying to setup IPSec VPN for my NVIDIA Shield until I found there is no built in VPN to do it. Also trying with 3rd party apps to do it was not working. I used to have OpenVPN app but I dont need anymore since I can route VPN traffic from router directly to Shield. OpenVPN speeds arent that great so im not using it anymore. Just wish I could get IPSec or Wireguard to work.
I guess yeah, but can’t the same argument be made for phone manufacturers as well?
Ah that is a very fair point
For what it is worth: you can accomplish this (wireguard VPN) without modifying the shield if you have a sufficiently capable router. opnsense/pfsense for example will allow you to setup the wireguard tunnel on the router itself and then use policy-based routing to send traffic through the VPN. The Shield has no idea anything is going on, as far as it knows the gateway is just doing its job and forwarding packets to the internet.
Businesses use VPNs to allow workers to log into internal systems remotely.
Yep thats how I routed my OpenVPN connection to shield, when I got my new router. Didnt need to use that app anymore.
See I could see that for sure and would agree, but I couldn’t see the legal use case for making the native VPN enabled, Nvidia supported and a marketed feature of the shield tv setup box
Bypassing country content restrictions and bypassing unsupported countries in geforce now would be the most typical use case sure but then they are just asking for trouble from their own partners
Indeed. It makes sense for phones and tablets, but for a TV box, that’s going to be pirate streams and geoIP bypassing.
So if thats truly the case, why don’t they block VPNs on their Play Store? What if I wanted just connect to my HDHomerun remotely?
Nvidia and Google don’t want to actually block VPNs, they just want to do the bare minimal required to not piss off the major streaming providers.