Yoga VPN Review

Yoga VPN is a free VPN service. Unlike other companies that allow you to pay for premium access, there is not that option with this one. Instead, it has a strange “coins” system. The more “coins” you have, the more stable and fast your connection could be. You obtain those coins by doing different tasks inside the VPN app. That includes checking in, watching videos, inviting friends, entering codes, and a button that gives you a random number of coins each time. It is only available for Android and iOS devices, has more than 10 million downloads, and a Google Play Store rating of 4.6 stars. They make the standard bold claims on their Google listing, but our review is more critical of their ratings.

About the Company

There is very little we can find out about the company behind Yoga VPN. However, we found that the mobile app development company, Lanpiper PTE LTD developed the VPN for its parent company, Yolo Technology. While the company is officially registered in Hong Kong, it is clear that they have Chinese roots. As you might expect, the company lacks transparency.

Server Locations

The way that Yoga VPN presents their server list is confusing. They offer 3 different levels, again based on their unusual coin system. If you’ve ever played free games on your mobile device, some games have energy limits. The basic or level 1 servers are 900 coins a day. The tier includes two locations. The second tier is 1800 coins a day and offers six locations in three countries. Finally, the third tier offers 27 locations, divided between 15 countries. Some of them have more than one city listed, but we did not include them here. You start with 2000 coins. Interestingly, the server and country selection in the lower levels is suspicious. It seems to keep changing countries, and there does not seem to be any consistency. The countries for all three tiers are:

Yoga VPN Features

Since this VPN has no features to speak of, we will show you the 4 screens of the app. In the top right hand corner of the screen, you can see the coins. If you want to switch regions, the second screen is what you will see. The third screen shows how you get points, while the fourth screen gives you the option to proxy separate apps. As we mentioned above, the available servers keep changing, as do the countries. That makes us wonder if this VPN service is P2P based. If that is the case, this VPN has more issues than we mentioned.

Security and Privacy Policy

As far as security goes, you find the statement that “All traffic (UDP / TCP) is encrypted when Yoga VPN is running.” Those letters typically refer to OpenVPN UDP/TCP. However, there is no way to select which one or even look at it. Their privacy policy is equally as vague. It states they do not collect personal information, but they do collect non-personal information. They also fully comply with law enforcement requests. Since law enforcement is the Chinese government, you may want to think twice about using Yoga VPN.

Hands-On Testing

Now, we will get down to the basics of the service. Of course, that means we are going to test the service using three different categories. Those are the DNS leak test, the speed tests, and the streaming tests. This is where VPNs usually run into issues.

DNS Leak test

For this test, we wanted to use the second level servers. However, there were none available at the time we tried. As you can see in this image, we tested DNS leakage to a server in the Netherlands. While we did not get a leak that showed our actual address, it did show a number of other servers. That shows the service has a problem with leaks.

Speed Test

As far as speed goes, Yoga VPN performed very poorly. We tested to a server in New York. In the image below, you can see the speed test when we connected to a NYC server.

However, you need to compare that with our baseline performance. The speed you see below is a test to the same server without connecting to the VPN.

As you can see, we suffered a massive 99.8% drop in speed when using the VPN. We also tested three more locations: Ashburn, VA (the closest to us), France, and the UK. Here are the results we got.

• Ashburn, VA – 2.50 Mbps
• France – 3.43 Mbps
• UK – 0.14 Mbps

These speeds make the service extremely slow and not really suitable for streaming.

BBC iPlayer and Netflix Tests

Other tests we like to perform are to access Netflix and BBC iPlayer. On the left side, we connected to the BBC and were able to get the show to play. The image on the right shows the differences between American Netflix (center) and the British version (right). While it did display us in the UK, we could not find specific UK content, at least it did when we tried. The issue is the slow performance of the VPN makes it hard to stream content.

Customer Service

If you need help while using Yoga VPN, you can contact them via a single Google Gmail account. You should have no expectation of when they may answer you back. Since there is no website other than for their privacy policy, they do not have an FAQ section or a knowledge base. You are on your own if you have any issues arise.

Conclusion

As we wrap up our Yoga VPN review, we will go over the good points of the service and what needs to be improved. Unfortunately, the list is very skewed.

Good Points

• Unblocked BBC iPlayer in our tests
• Free VPN service

Improvements

• Inconsistent network
• Extremely slow and virtually unusable
• No transparency on anything including encryption
• Not enough information on the website
• Only available for iOS and Android devices
• Very strange server system and tiering structure
• Vague privacy policy
• Featureless app
• DNS leaks

There is not much good we can say about this one. It has a strange setup, is extremely slow, and dangerous to use because of the Chinese ties. It might be ok to help you unblock geo-restricted websites from time to time, but streaming is out based on poor performance. There are many other choices in the community that would provide you with a better experience.