Putting an entire phone behind a VPN breaks payment apps that fingerprint country, slows local food delivery, and trips bank fraud heuristics. Some banking apps refuse to start at all when they detect a VPN-shaped network. The result: every time you want to use ChatGPT, you toggle the VPN; then you toggle it off to order food; then on again. Friction kills the habit.
Split tunneling on QPOL Android lets you mark only the apps that need protection. Pick ChatGPT, Claude, the geo-blocked tool of the week — leave banking, taxi, delivery, smart-home and the system itself native. The phone routes per-app, not per-device.
The mental model: think of the tunnel as a pipe with a label. Apps you label go through the pipe. Apps you don't, never see it. Updates to apps inherit the same label. Adding a new app starts unlabelled; you turn the label on if you want it protected.
A common surprise: some apps do most of their work in webviews that share network stack with the system. You might tunnel "Chrome" and discover that an in-app browser of another app uses the same routing path. The Android API exposes this consistently, but it's worth checking — turn the tunnel on, open the app, watch network meters in QPOL's live status to confirm.
For TV use the same model applies: see the Android TV use case. For desktop platforms split tunneling lands as those clients ship.