Routing

How it works

Pingle does not send all your traffic through one country. The app decides, connection by connection, where it goes: it looks at the site's name, the protocol and the address, and checks them against its rules from the top down. The first rule that fits decides, and whatever fits none goes to the location you have chosen.

There are no rules to write: it all works out of the box, the same on any device. This page describes routing for connections from Russia: we tune the rules for each country separately.

The order of the checks

An independent news site in the .ru zone reaches the "always via VPN" list before the rule for Russian sites, so it goes through the tunnel. YouTube is checked before "everything else", so it goes via Russia rather than your location.

The first two steps are housekeeping: they choose no route, they make sure nothing slips past the rules. The last line is the default route: your location.

Secure DNS

Whenever you open a site, the device first asks for its numeric address (DNS). Pingle intercepts every one of these queries to encrypt them through Cloudflare's secure service, and then they travel strictly inside the protected tunnel. So your provider cannot see which sites you visit.

Always via the VPN

• Independent media blocked in Russia: Dozhd, Novaya Gazeta, The Insider, Echo, The Moscow Times, Snob, The Village.
• Anime sites blocked in Russia: AnimeGo, Anilibria, AniDub, Jut.su and others.
• Games and apps: Roblox, Google Play and Android app downloads, Google update downloads, Xiaomi.
• Apple: App Store, Apple Music.
• Habr, Microsoft Copilot and Bing, GitHub Copilot, Autodesk.
• Video on Twitch.

Always direct

These connections have no need of the tunnel: local stays local, with no detour through another country.

Other Russian services go direct too, wherever their site lives: Ozon, Wildberries, Avito, Cian, 2GIS, AliExpress, Aviasales, Okko, Wink, Kion, Premier, Pikabu, Kaspersky, Stepik, Likee, Yappy, Kinescope video players, and some anime and manga readers (MangaLib, AniLib).

So do Zoom, Reddit, Tumblr, Snapchat, Shutterstock, ResearchGate, Springer and Nextcloud; Samsung and Huawei device services; Tencent game servers; the connectivity checks operating systems make; and IP address check services: they see your real connection.

AI services via the USA

Some AI services restrict access by country. In the USA they are fully available, so Pingle sends them there whichever location you have chosen:

• Google Gemini and Google AI Studio;
• Google Labs experiments: Flow, Whisk, Stitch, Illuminate, Jules, Firebase Studio, Antigravity, IDX;
• Grok by xAI;
• Sora by OpenAI.

YouTube and Google via Russia

YouTube and Google's services go through Pingle's server in Russia. YouTube has turned off monetisation in Russia, so with a Russian address videos play without ads, and there is no need for Premium.

Everything else: your location

The remaining connections Pingle checks by address: any other address in Russia goes direct, Google's networks via Russia. Everything left goes to your location, the Netherlands by default.

On Apple devices and some other platforms, Russian addresses and local networks bypass the tunnel at the system level too: it is faster.

In the Netherlands, Germany and Russia the app picks the fastest server and connection method itself: it measures again every three minutes and switches only when another is clearly faster. In the USA one connection method is fixed by default, and you can choose another by hand. More on the locations.

What you can set

Now: the location. In the app, choose where everything else goes: the Netherlands, Germany, Russia or the USA. This changes only the default route: YouTube still goes via Russia, AI services via the USA, Russian services direct.

Soon: a choice per service. This is in development: you will be able to choose which apps go via the VPN and which go direct. For example: Discord via the VPN, everything else direct.

The apps are not out yet: leave your contact and we will tell you when they are. When mobile internet is put on a whitelist, the client looks for a way through: see whitelist bypass.