Using a VPN on a television has always involved a degree of friction that the same software on a phone or laptop rarely imposes. ExpressVPN's latest update to its Apple TV app addresses that friction directly, introducing a redesigned home screen, home screen favourites, three additional protocol options, and a built-in speed test. The update is available now through the App Store and is included with existing subscriptions.
Why TV Remains the Hardest Platform for VPN Apps
The gap between a VPN experience on a smartphone and one on a television comes down to input. A phone offers a touchscreen, predictive text, and gesture navigation. A TV remote offers a directional pad and a handful of buttons. Every extra menu, every server search, every settings adjustment costs more time and effort on a television than on any other device.
This is not a trivial usability problem. VPN adoption on television has grown alongside the expansion of streaming services, whose content libraries vary by country. A viewer in one country who wants access to a library available in another, or who simply wants to protect their home network traffic as it passes through their internet service provider, needs a VPN that doesn't demand patience every time they use it. When the tool becomes a chore, people disable it or stop using it. That outcome defeats its purpose entirely.
ExpressVPN's approach with this update is to reduce the number of steps between opening the app and being connected. That is a meaningful design objective for any VPN interface, but it is especially consequential on a platform where interaction is constrained.
What the Update Actually Changes
The redesigned home screen consolidates the most-used controls into a single view: the connection toggle, the selected location, the active protocol, the most recently used location, and any saved favourite locations. Previously, accessing favourites required navigating to a separate locations menu. They now appear as quick-access tiles on the first screen a user sees. One click connects to a saved favourite - no scrolling through a full server list, no on-screen keyboard.
The protocol additions are the most technically substantive change. The app previously offered Lightway - ExpressVPN's proprietary protocol - and an automatic selection mode. This update adds WireGuard and OpenVPN in both its UDP and TCP variants.
- WireGuard is an open-source protocol praised for its lean codebase and strong performance characteristics on modern hardware.
- OpenVPN UDP prioritises speed by minimising handshake overhead, making it suitable for most general use cases.
- OpenVPN TCP trades some speed for reliability and is often more effective on networks that restrict or throttle certain traffic types.
- Lightway remains available and is ExpressVPN's own implementation - designed for fast connection times and efficiency on lower-power devices.
For the majority of users, the Automatic setting remains the correct choice. The protocol the app selects will typically be the most appropriate for the current network. But manual protocol selection matters in specific situations: when a network applies deep packet inspection to block VPN traffic, when a particular server is underperforming, or when a user has a considered preference based on their own threat model or network environment. Having those options available on Apple TV, where they were previously absent, brings the platform closer to parity with the desktop and mobile versions of the same software.
The speed test rounds out the update. It benchmarks server performance from the Apple TV itself, rather than requiring a user to switch to another device to check whether a slow stream is a server issue or something else. It is a small addition in technical terms, but it closes an information gap that previously made troubleshooting needlessly inconvenient.
The Broader Context: Encryption on the Living Room Screen
VPN use on televisions reflects a broader shift in where people do sensitive or location-dependent digital activity. The television is no longer a passive broadcast receiver. Modern smart TVs and streaming devices handle login credentials, payment information, watchlists, and viewing histories. That data travels across home networks and through internet service providers, where it is subject to logging, profiling, and in some jurisdictions, compelled disclosure to third parties.
A VPN does not eliminate all privacy risks - it shifts the trust relationship from an ISP to a VPN provider, which is a meaningful distinction. It also encrypts traffic between the device and the VPN server, which limits what an ISP or local network observer can see. For users on shared or public networks, that protection is more significant still.
Protocol choice intersects with these considerations in practical ways. OpenVPN TCP, for example, can route traffic over port 443 - the same port used by standard HTTPS web traffic - which makes VPN connections harder to identify and block on restrictive networks. WireGuard, by contrast, uses UDP and a fixed port, which makes it easier to configure and audit but also easier to identify. Neither is universally superior; the right choice depends on the network environment and the user's specific needs.
ExpressVPN's decision to surface these options on Apple TV suggests a recognition that television viewers are not a less sophisticated audience than laptop users. They have the same range of use cases, the same threat environments, and now, the same set of tools.
