Platform: Android
Title: Connectivity blocked in apps using Google Play Services on Android 16
Blokada 5 download from GitHub via Obtainium
Device: Samsung Galaxy S25, no custom ROM, OS version: Android 16, OneUI 8.0, Security patch level: 1 Sept 2025, Google Play system: 1 Aug 2025
The problem shows up when Blokada is enabled, but seems to be caused by the OS when using a VPN, not by Blokada itself.
In detail:
With Android 15, I did not have any problems. After having updated to Android 16 a few days ago, I got connection problems from several but not all apps.
No blocked activity was shown in Blokada. Disabling all blocklists in Blokada did not help. Additionally preferring the network DNS in the Blokada network settings did not help either. (Actually, connectivity was back for a few seconds after each change, presumably because Blokada was disabled temporarily while applying the change, but then the same problem came back.)
Only completely disabling Blokada solved the problem.
To investigate what was happening, I used PCAPdroid. For capturing network traffic, this app simulates a VPN (like Blokada does), and to be able to do so, it required to disable the Always-on VPN switch for Blokada. As there can only be one VPN active at a time, Blokada got disabled.
While capturing with PCAPdroid, the same connectivity problem showed up until I stopped capturing. It looks like the problem is related to simulating a VPN at all and not specific to Blokada. I did not test with a real VPN.
The PCAPdroid capture showed that all apps with connectivity problems attempted to make connections through Google Play services, not by themselves.
I have an old phone running Android 8 and Blokada 4. With the same version of Google play services (the newest version available: 25.39.31), this device does not have connectivity problems.
So it looks like any app simulating a VPN may cause connectivity problems in apps using the Google Play services on Android 16. One such app is Blokada (5, I don’t know about 6).
One affected app using Google play services is the Samsung Galaxy Store — if you need one for testing (it does not reach the update server). (You may find other such apps if you revoke all permissions of Google Play services and find an app that asks for permissions.)
After re-enabling Always-on VPN for Blokada, I bypassed Google play services in Blokada — without success. Then I bypassed one of the apps connecting through Google Play services. Now it got connectivity (and ads). This looks contradictory to my observations above, but maybe it is not — does Blokada bypass an app by just configuring it to bypass any VPN?
Any help or advice is appreciated. Maybe, nothing can be done at the moment, and we need to wait for an OS bug fix. Until then, I hope my observations are helpful for others having the same problems.
