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REVIEW
Avast SecureLine VPN works fine. The brand it sits under is the problem.
A competent paid VPN client from Gen Digital, the conglomerate that absorbed Avast after the 2020 Jumpshot data-selling scandal. The product is fine. The trust math is harder.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Avast SecureLine VPN & Privacy
AVAST SOFTWARE
OUR SCORE
6.3
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 4.3
PRICE
Free
In-app purchases
A VPN is a trust transaction. You are paying a company to see all of your traffic so that nobody else can — your ISP, the airport Wi-Fi, the advertiser network, whoever else is on the same coffee-shop subnet. The whole product is the promise that the company you hand your packets to will not look at them, will not log them, will not sell them. Everything else — the speed test, the country list, the app icon — is secondary to that single transaction.
Avast SecureLine VPN, as a piece of Android software in 2026, is fine. The Mimic protocol is fast, the kill switch works, the split-tunnelling is well-implemented, the UI does not get in the way. If a friend asked which VPN client on the Play Store was the most polished build, SecureLine would be on the shortlist. As a piece of consumer software in isolation, it earns a 7.
The catch is that the company behind it spent six years operating a subsidiary, Jumpshot, that sold clickstream data harvested from Avast users to marketers — a practice exposed by Motherboard and PCMag in early 2020, shut down weeks later, and settled with the FTC in 2024 for $16.5 million and a permanent ban on selling browsing data for advertising. Gen Digital, the holding company that absorbed Avast in 2022, did not commit that breach. It also did not unwind it. For a product whose entire job is “trust us with your packets,” that history is the review.
A VPN is a trust transaction. You are paying a company to see all of your traffic so that nobody else can. Avast spent years on the wrong side of that transaction.
FEATURES
Avast SecureLine VPN is a paid subscription VPN client for Android, now sold under the Gen Digital umbrella alongside Norton, Avira, AVG, and CCleaner. It runs on a network of servers across roughly 50 countries, supports the usual OpenVPN and WireGuard-style protocols (Avast calls its WireGuard implementation "Mimic"), and ships with a kill switch, split-tunnelling per app, and auto-connect on untrusted Wi-Fi.
Pricing is subscription-only, billed annually or monthly through Google Play. The free tier is a time-limited trial rather than a permanent free band — Avast does not sell a perpetually-free VPN the way Proton or Windscribe do. A single subscription typically covers up to 10 devices across Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS.
No ad-blocking, no tracker-blocking, no integrated password manager. SecureLine is positioned as a single-purpose VPN inside a wider Gen Digital security suite — if you want bundle features, you upsell into Norton 360 or Avast One.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The client itself is well-built. Connection times are fast, the Mimic / WireGuard protocol delivers competitive speeds, and the UI is plain enough that a non-technical user can flip it on without consulting a wiki. Split-tunnelling is genuinely useful — exempt your banking app from the tunnel so it doesn't trip fraud heuristics, route everything else through Frankfurt.
Kill-switch behaviour is correct: when the tunnel drops, traffic stops, full stop. Many cheaper Android VPNs leak in that moment. Auto-connect rules for untrusted Wi-Fi work as advertised and are the single best argument for keeping any VPN installed on a phone.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The structural problem is not the app. It is Avast's history. From 2014 to early 2020, an Avast subsidiary called Jumpshot collected and sold detailed browsing data from Avast users — clickstream-level data, packaged for marketers — and the practice was only shut down after joint reporting by Vice's Motherboard and PCMag. Avast shuttered Jumpshot in January 2020, and in 2024 the FTC ordered Avast to pay $16.5 million and barred it from selling or licensing browsing data for advertising. That is the company asking you to route all of your traffic through its servers.
The 2022 merger into Gen Digital does not reset that history. The product is now a small line item inside a publicly traded security conglomerate whose business model is selling renewing subscriptions across a portfolio of legacy brands. Independents like Mullvad (cash payments, anonymous accounts, no logs, audited) and Proton VPN (Swiss jurisdiction, free tier, repeatedly audited) treat trust as the primary product. Avast treats it as a recoverable reputation problem.
CONCLUSION
Install SecureLine if you already pay Norton or Avast for something else and want one less bill. Skip it if a VPN's entire purpose — trust — is what you actually came shopping for. Mullvad costs €5 a month flat, takes cash, and has been audited end-to-end; Proton VPN has a real free tier and a clean record. Both ask less of your goodwill than the company that used to sell your browsing data does.