I’ve had an issue with websites being prevented from loading when on wifi, running through Armor VPN. Even with this NETGEAR Community forum…the page starts to load (I see the progress bar get to about 15%) but then it stalls-out and simply won’t finish loading. When I turn-off wifi and just use cellular service the same websites load almost instantly.
I’m on iOS 15.4, with wifi through a NETGEAR Mesh MR60, with speeds of almost 700Mbps to my home.
Any thoughts about why the Armor VPN is so restrictive on loading websites?
I frequently get a similar issue on my iPhone 12 Pro Max where browsing from Safari or running some apps stall when the Armor web protection is running in the background.
If I pause web protection in the Armor app or toggle airplane mode then browsing returns to normal or the apps that stalled come to life. I've had this issue on WiFi and 4G, and across numerous iOS versions since I subscribed to Armor last year. It very occasionally happens on my iPad. Sometimes I wait like a minute and click refresh and the web page request completes ok, but I usually get frustrated and just pause web protection for the 15 mins option and it clears the issue for a few days, even after the 15 mins pause has elapsed and web protection has automatically re enabled.
Because the issue occurs on WiFi and 4G I think I can rule out my Orbi mesh network. Also another household member's iPhone running Armor doesn't experience the same issue at the same time, but will get the issue at random times. The occasional issue with my iPad may be some other quirk, leaving me thinking it's specific to the iPhone/Safari/iOS ecosystem and therefore more likely an Apple issue. Meanwhile my MacBook Pro running Armor web protection on the same WiFi has never stalled with Safari sessions.
I suspect there's an interoperability issue between iOS and 3rd party VPNs.
I'm seeing the same problem, it is impacting two iPads and two iPhones. Lately it has become so bad that one iPad won't go more than 15 minutes without getting into the stalling scenario. I finally had to permanently pause the web protection to get my wife's iPad and iPhone to where she can use them. My next step is to remove the app from the iPads and iPhones.
I have used other VPN-based apps before - CloudFlare's 1.1.1.1 Secure DNS app - and had zero problems. Armor / Bitdefender definitely has an issue.
I think the issue is caused by Armor's inability to keep persistent sessions across its VPN. Possibly due to its load balancing architecture. So without Armor a Safari session or app using HTTPS session to a cloud service would simply refresh no problem after it was left a few hours or days. However with Armor running the session gets orphaned and the only way to re-initiate it is to (1) pause or quit or resume web protection (2) toggle airplane mode (3) reboot the iOS device (4) clear Safari cache and restart.
Some other VPN architectures seem to cope better as they maintain or cache the session and can resume it regardless of the region the responding or active LB is located.
What is odd is the indeterminate time it takes for the session to tombstone as it's not a consistent time. So I'm wondering if it's more a factor related to their load balancing switching sessions about geographic regions than a discrete session timeout parameter.
