Aloha Browser – Private VPN

Sadly, I am writing this review because I am no longer going to maintain Aloha as my default browser. I have, for better or (sometimes much) worse, fully immersed myself in Apples playground. My day-to-day has just become harder to manage by not using Safari. Apple is a wildly aggressive company. They hobble any app that could possibly chip away at their mountain of dominance. And sadly Aloha has become, rather, HAS BEEN a target of this aggression. That being said, USE THIS BROWSER! Aloha is worth absolutely every cent of the ten or eleven bucks they charge PER YEAR. It has excellent security features I’ve never seen on other browsers. It has a Crypto wallet. It has a robust VPN, free of charge, that can cover ALL of your devices. Alohas UI (user interface) is clean and efficient; it’s always easy to navigate the app and find what it is you’re looking for, be-it surface level settings or more advanced settings/options. I have Aloha automatically turn on the VPN when I open the app. It’s nice to know you’re safe with an app. That doesn’t happen often anymore. There’s a lot that makes Aloha special and worth giving a try. No, I am not a fake reviewer or something. Just some 33 year old dude lost in Ohio. I just realized it was kinda a big change for me switching browsers because I had been using Aloha for so long. I really felt like this app deserved a nod and some recognition. Give it a try. I doubt you’ll regret it.

I like this app a lot. I eventually set it as my default browser. Has great security features and the video player is my favorite of any other app. Safari has now incorporated some of the features like swiping anywhere on screen to scroll through a video but this app has more intuitive controls like swiping up and down on the screen to the left; for controlling brightness, or on the right side of the screen for volume. Absolutely brilliant, now I don’t have to flip my phone upright, swipe down from the top right corner to bring out the control center to adjust either of those. It also makes downloading media from just about anywhere on the web a breeze. Try it yourself, the average user has more than enough features at their disposal without having to get a subscription, however anyone who’s serious about their online privacy knows you will have to shell out some dollars for any kind of respectable defense online. Their subscription is inexpensive and offers mostly convenience options to add to what is already available for free. I recommend it for everyone. Decide for yourself though whether their subscription is right for your needs.

If I could rate the app overall and the current update, the first would be a 4/5 stars and the current update (3.3.0) would be 2/5 stars. So I’ve averaged at 3. I love so many things about this app, from the password protect feature to the built-in VPN and ad block if you need them, but the media play features, download capabilities, and then the playback features is the main reason I use this app! One of my favorite features is while watching a video fullscreen, you can scrub (fast forward or rewind) by sliding your finger along the bottom of the screen. In prior versions, you could also tap and slide on a specific area of the screen to increase your screen’s brightness or the device volume. But in 3.3.0, they also increased the area where this happens… so you inadvertently increase or decrease your screen brightness while trying to fast forward or rewind. But you also used to be able to swipe down on the video to exit fullscreen mode. Now, that just causes the screen to go black from the brightness slide getting activated. This update alone has me not wanting to use the app at all anymore. Developer, PLEASE revert these features back. Please! Or give us the opportunity to turn the brightness/volume sliders off. Also in 3.3.0, they’ve changed the way you save files into folders. In general, I like the new way as it shows all the folders similar to how they’re shown on a Mac… but it is very glitchy and is super easy to save to the wrong folder or not be able to save at all (because the “download to” button isn’t visible). Don’t get me wrong… this really is a great app overall…. But I wish I could revert to the version prior to this last update. It was a 4/5!