VPN Toggle and Display - Effortlessly shows if a VPN is on using Focus

VPN
1

Hi guys, I always use a VPN but sometimes I need to disable it.

The problem: iOS doesn’t show if the VPN is on/off unless you drag the control center down. I hate this. Sometimes I don’t remember if the VPN is on or off and I need to manually go and check.

The solution: I made a shortcut that:

  1. Toggles the VPN on/off (so that I can do it without going to the vpn app).
    Note that this step is optional. If you want the script to check if a VPN is connected only you can remove this step.

  2. Checks the current IP.

  3. If the IP belongs to the VPN server then the VPN is enabled.

  4. If the VPN is enabled it activates a focus mode (that doesn’t do anything except displaying an icon next to the time that tells me if the VPN is on).

Unfortunately I don’t think that shortcuts allows to check if a VPN is on/off so the check IP method is the only one I found. This means that if you use a commercial vpn app you should memorize in your script the IP addresses of the servers that you usually connect to.

2

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Here it is in action

3

Guys an update. Using the shortcut for some time now and the “Get current IP Address” action from shortcuts connects to an apple server to query the device ip. Sometimes the server throws a 502 error (bad gateway) and the shortcut fails. Workaround: I made a v2 that tries to get the ip from apple. If it fails then it will get it from a curl query

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(Failure = any error message triggered by “get current ip”. The error message will be more than 16 chars, usually it’s a long html error page. Why 16 chars: because an ip(v4) max length is 12 digits + 3 dots = 15 chars. Es: 123.123.123.123)

4

Pretty genius. It’s pretty much the best case scenario for me as well, aside from when in DND or Bedtime. Thanks for sharing!

5

Can optimize it with the app ”Actions”, it adds the option to check VPN status

6

How do you do this though?? Can you maybe make a screen recording tutorial or something? This is genius but I am technologically illiterate lol

7

Can you share download link for v2 with us please?

8

You got it! Shortcuts