Windscribe fights back against censorship with new apps for users in Iran and Russia

The best VPNs are having a hard time in restrictive countries like Russia and Iran, which are continually introducing new and more sophisticated VPN blocks. However, one VPN that continues to fight for accessible internet everywhere is Windscribe.

After promising its users in late January that it’s beta testing an app “with a new connection method that has shown promising results,” the VPN company has now rolled out new versions of its mobile VPN apps, which include the censorship-resistant AmneziaWG protocol.

Read on to find out how these new apps are better, why and how Russia and Iran are restricting the internet, and how VPN usage is being affected for their citizens.

What does the new app version include?

The biggest change with Windscribe’s new beta apps is the integration of the censorship-resistant AmneziaWG (Amnezia WireGuard) VPN protocol, which is now directly accessible within these apps.

Previously, users living in restrictive countries had to download the AmneziaWG configuration file, contact customer support, and edit the config file themselves. Now, however, Windscribe has significantly lowered the technical barrier to using AmneziaWG.

“Latest release on Play Store and App Store has some new WireGuard options to try with the Circumvent Censorship toggle enabled,” WireGuard announced via its X channel.

The newly rolled-out Windscribe Android VPN and iPhone VPN apps come with a Circumvent Censorship toggle, which you can turn on to enable the AmneziaWG protocol. This modifies packet signatures so they appear to ISPs, hackers, and government agencies that block VPN traffic as random junk or irregular web traffic, making them harder to detect.

AmneziaWG is a tweaked version of the standard WireGuard protocol. It has been tuned to mask identifiable network signatures, enabling it to bypass deep packet inspection (DPI) systems. At the same time, it delivers all of WireGuard’s core benefits, such as better speeds, a reduced attack surface, and cutting-edge cryptography.

Why were users in Iran and Russia having issues connecting?

Russia and Iran are two countries with some of the strongest internet and VPN restrictions in the world. Iran, for instance, completely shut down its internet in early January this year after citizens took to the streets in protest. According to Cloudflare Radar, internet traffic in Iran dropped to effectively zero, signaling a near-total internet blackout.

Russia, meanwhile, previously blocked Roblox and, more recently, Telegram and WhatsApp, in a bid to push citizens toward a state-controlled Max app, which isn’t encrypted and freely shares user data with the Russian government.

While many Western VPNs simply don’t work in these regions anymore, some like Windscribe that use censorship-resistant protocols do. However, both governments have started clamping down hard on VPN usage. Iran is shifting to whitelisting filter technologies, providing citizens with only a small list of approved websites they can access.

Russia, on the other hand, is increasingly refining its DPI-based filtering systems, proactively blocking specific IP addresses of VPN servers, and it has even allocated 2.27 billion rubles (~$29 million) to build an AI-powered filtering system that leverages machine learning to filter and block VPN connections.

As a result, Windscribe saw a new wave of VPN blocking in Iran and Russia. The VPN company recorded an almost 90% drop in Russian traffic in January.