This past April, Cloudflare and APNIC released a new 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver service whose goal was not only to make looking up Internet addresses faster, but also make them more private. Today, Cloudflare has released a 1.1.1.1 app for Android and iOS to easily bring these same features to your mobile devices.
Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service takes advantage of their extensive network infrastructure to perform domain name lookups extremely fast by connecting users to servers that are geographically closer to them. Even better, their service is geared towards privacy by not logging any IP addresses to disk and wiping all transaction logs within 24 hours.
While mobile devices could have already used the 1.1.1.1 service by switching the DNS servers manually, by utilizing this app users can enable the service by simply toggling it on in the app. Doing so will generate a VPN profile, which will automatically reroute the DNS traffic through the app so that it utilizes the 1.1.1.1 DNS servers.
One concern that users have been commenting on is that the Android app requires permission to record audio from a phone's microphone and has access to the photos and USB storage. According to Cloudflare, this permission is required for and only used when generating bug reports.
The 1.1.1.1 mobile app is available now for Android and iOS. If you try it, let us know what you think.
Comments
britechguy - 4 years ago
Although it has gotten somewhat better with time, Android permissions granularity is not anywhere near to fine enough for anyone to know why a given permission might be asked for. It should become standard operating practice (and has, for some developers) to give just the sort of information that was offered above after the question was asked, but *before* it needs to be asked. It saves everyone a lot of grief and confusion.
JBTito - 4 years ago
Having VPN turned on all the time will drain the battery.
It would be great to have option to manually change DNS without having to root device.
DuranO - 4 years ago
Latest version of the app just removed the Mic permission, storage permission is still there for reporting bugs.