Install a VPN on your Fire Stick or Android TV

A VPN running on your phone protects your phone. It does nothing for the streaming box plugged into the television, which is usually the device doing the most watching. If the goal is that your internet provider cannot see which services your household uses, the TV is the device that matters most.

Installing on the device also means the connection follows it. Take the stick to a hotel or a relative’s house and it connects the same way on their network as it does on yours.

StreamShield is distributed as an Android app file from our own site rather than through an app store listing, so installing it means sideloading — downloading the file onto the device and opening it. Fire OS supports this natively; it just needs turning on first.

• 1. Allow installs from unknown sources. On Fire TV, go to Settings → My Fire TV → Developer Options and enable installing apps from unknown sources. On Android TV, the device asks the first time instead.
• 2. Install a downloader utility. Fire TV ships without a general-purpose browser or file manager, so you need a small downloader app from its store to fetch the file.
• 3. Download the app file. Enter the address shown on our Get App page, which always serves the current release and publishes its version and size.
• 4. Open the download to install it. The downloader will offer to open the file when it finishes. Confirm the install prompt.
• 5. Sign in and allow the VPN permission. Open StreamShield, sign in, and accept the Android prompt asking to allow a VPN connection. Pick a server, connect, and open your streaming app.

Android TV boxes and Google TV devices follow the same steps, minus the downloader — most of them have a browser or file manager already.

Sideloading only means installing from outside an app store. Whether it is safe depends entirely on the source of the file, which is why our Get App page publishes the version number and exact file size for every release, and always serves the file we built.

Download it from us, not from a third-party APK mirror. A repackaged VPN client is a uniquely bad thing to install, because it sees all of your traffic by design.

Smart TVs from most manufacturers, games consoles and older streaming boxes cannot install a VPN at all. The answer there is to move the VPN one level up, onto the router.

Your account can issue a standard OpenVPN profile, and a router that supports OpenVPN can hold that connection for the whole network. Everything behind it is covered without installing anything on the individual devices, and it uses just one of your plan’s simultaneous connections rather than one per device.

• Pick a server close to you. Distance costs latency, and TV devices have less headroom to absorb it than a laptop does.
• Use Ethernet where the device supports it. Wireless is the usual bottleneck on a 4K stream, VPN or not.
• If one server buffers, switch servers before blaming the VPN — load differs between them.
• Close background apps on Fire TV. It is aggressive about reclaiming memory, which is the most common cause of an app losing its connection mid-episode.

More on what to expect from playback speed in the streaming VPN guide.