On: Android Oreo

[jfim]

You can already have an always-on third party VPN that has nothing to do with Google.

This is just a feature that was on some phones that's rolled out to the base OS now. It's opt in AFAICR, there's a prompt to enable it when you first boot the phone.

[notatoad → jfim]

It's not when you first boot, it's when you first connect to an unsecured public wifi network. the opt-in is per-network, not just a single opt-in.

and it's not rolled into the base OS either, it's part of "google connectivity services" which is distributed separately.