Combining Proxy and VPN on Android – Help Needed

General Discussion Forum
1

Hey all, I’m dealing with a tricky situation and would appreciate some advice. Let me break it down.

The Issue

My mobile carrier offers “unlimited” YouTube access and 30GB of general data. However, after I use a certain amount of YouTube data, the connection to YouTube is throttled to 500kbps. So far, using a VPN solves the throttling issue, but I’m trying to figure out a more advanced setup.

My Current Setup

I’m using the HTTP Injector app on Android, where:

  • I set up an HTTP proxy that injects a payload (e.g., adds a youtube.com header to all outgoing traffic).
  • This causes all my traffic to look like YouTube, but it gets throttled to 500kbps due to my mobile provider.

What I Need Help With

I’m wondering if there’s a way to:

  1. Combine the HTTP proxy with a VPN, so the VPN can bypass the throttling, while the proxy keeps injecting the YouTube header.
  2. Alternatively, run the HTTP proxy on my Android device and then share the connection with my laptop, where I could run the VPN to bypass the throttling.

In short:

  • I want all traffic to appear as youtube.com (to avoid throttling).
  • I need a way to chain the HTTP proxy and VPN to achieve this.
  • Is this technically possible on Android?
  • If not, could I use a tethered connection to a laptop with a VPN to solve this?

Any advice or insights would be appreciated!

1 Like
2

Yo, chaining a proxy with a VPN can be a bit tricky, especially on Android. It’s technically possible, but the key issue is routing both the proxy traffic and the VPN traffic correctly. Here’s one way to go about it:

  1. Set up HTTP Injector as usual with the payload injection.
  2. Use “VPN Hotspot” app to share the VPN connection to other devices.
  3. From your laptop, connect to your phone’s shared VPN and route all traffic through the VPN there.

It’s a hacky setup, but this should trick the network into thinking all your traffic is YouTube-related and bypass the throttling. :hammer_and_wrench:

1 Like
3

Hmm, running both proxy and VPN together isn’t exactly straightforward because most VPN apps don’t natively support using an external proxy in tandem. You might need something like OpenVPN for Android, which has proxy options built-in. Set the proxy in OpenVPN, inject the payload through HTTP Injector, and then route it that way.

1 Like
4

You’re overthinking it, bro. Just set up the proxy directly on the VPN server—use a cloud VPS with Squid proxy, then configure the VPN on your phone to point at that server. This way, the payload injection happens server-side, and everything gets encrypted. Boom—no more throttling :bomb:.

2 Likes
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This is one convoluted setup, but I think it might work. Have you tried Proxifier on your laptop? You could run the HTTP proxy on the phone, connect the laptop to the phone’s hotspot, and use Proxifier to push the traffic through the VPN on your laptop.

6

You’ll probably need a rooted phone to properly chain a proxy and VPN at the same time. Otherwise, Android’s network stack tends to prioritize one over the other. Or… skip the headache and just rent a VPS to build a custom proxy/VPN chain :man_technologist:.