network programming - Detect if an always-on VPN is configured on Android

Question

I have an Android VPN application. When I fire the intent to start the VPN (via VPNService.prepare), it fails immediately if there's an always-on VPN already configured on the device. That seems reasonable, but I'd like to be able to easily detect that case, so I can show a helpful message to the user.

By 'always on' I mean the specific VPN always-on Android VPN flag: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/vpn#always-on

I can't seem to find a way to access that info, even though it is used internally in Android (e.g. here but that getAlwaysOnVpnPackage doesn't seem to be available publicly AFAICT).

The best option I've seen is Check if a VPN connection is active in Android?, which will tell you if any VPN connection is currently active, but that's not enough, because:

• I don't want to know about temporary VPN connections: I'm only interested if it's an always-on VPN connection.
• Sometimes 'always-on' connections aren't actually always on. If you have a disconnected connection and set it as 'always-on', it's configured as such, and blocks all other VPN installs, but there's no network connection created (Android shows a persistent warning instead, which takes you to the other app to activate the connection). Because there's no connection, the above technique doesn't work. I still need to detect this case, since it still blocks my VPN setup.

Is there any way to check whether the device currently has a VPN configured as 'always-on'?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65944167/detect-if-an-always-on-vpn-is-configured-on-android

Answer 1

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