• Beginner
• 5 min read
• Updated 2026-10-09

ClearDeck only helps while it is running. Getting protection started is the easy part — the install guide walks through it in about two minutes. Keeping it up for the next week, across reboots and long stretches with the screen off, is where Android and the phone makers get in the way.

This guide covers what actually stops the tunnel, the one setting that fixes reboots, and what to do when your phone’s software keeps killing it anyway.

Why the tunnel dies on reboot

On a stock Android phone, protection stops the moment the phone restarts. This is not a ClearDeck quirk: Android tears down every VPN tunnel at boot and waits for the user to start one again. That is deliberate — a VPN sees all of your traffic, so the system will not quietly restore one without your say-so.

The fix starts in ClearDeck and ends in Android’s own settings.

1. Open Settings → Start with system. ClearDeck jumps straight to Android’s VPN list for you.
2. In that list, find ClearDeck and tap the gear icon on its row.
3. Turn on Always-on VPN.

The screen tells you what to expect, in the app’s own words:

In the system VPN list, tap the gear icon next to ClearDeck and turn on “Always-on VPN”. The phone then reconnects automatically after every restart.

With Always-on VPN enabled, Android rebuilds the tunnel on every boot, before most apps have a chance to send anything. That is the whole fix for reboots.

The lockdown switch, and its honest downside

While you are on that gear-icon screen, Android may offer a second switch: Block connections without VPN. Read this before you flip it, because it changes what a failure looks like.

With lockdown on, the phone refuses all network traffic whenever the tunnel is down. The upside is obvious: nothing slips out unfiltered while protection is restarting. The downside is just as real — when protection fails to start, you do not see ads creep back in; you see no internet at all. Pages hang, messages sit unsent, and it is easy to decide the phone is broken.

So weigh it honestly: lockdown is a strong guarantee, and it moves the failure from silent to loud. Choose it if you would rather have no connection than an unfiltered one.

The notification is the lifeline

For as long as protection runs, ClearDeck keeps a permanent notification showing live upload and download speeds, for example ↑ 12.4 KB/s ↓ 1.1 MB/s, updated continuously.

That notification is not decoration. Android runs the ClearDeck engine as a foreground service, and a foreground service is precisely what tells the system “this process is doing something the user can see — do not reclaim it”. Dismiss the notification, or force-stop the app, and you are tearing down the tunnel yourself.

• Do not swipe the notification away.
• Do not use Force stop on ClearDeck (in Settings → Apps, or a task-killer).
• Do not tap Stop protection unless you actually mean to stop.

When your phone maker fights back

Stock Android already leans on background apps, but the heavy-handed behaviour comes from manufacturer skins. Huawei (EMUI), Xiaomi (MIUI and HyperOS) and OPPO (ColorOS) are widely known for killing background services aggressively to save battery — sometimes including a running VPN. A foreground service helps, but on these ROMs it is not always enough on its own.

The tools exist; their names and locations differ by brand, model and software version. Treat the list below as things to look up for your exact phone, not as a script that will match every menu:

• Autostart / auto-launch — some ROMs keep a separate allowlist of apps permitted to start on their own at boot. If ClearDeck is missing from it, Always-on VPN can still be overruled.
• Battery optimisation exemption — exclude ClearDeck from “battery optimisation” / “battery saver” / “app power management” so it is not suspended when idle.
• Lock in recents — in the recent-apps view, some ROMs let you lock an app so it is not cleared when you close everything else. It is a nudge, not a guarantee, but it often helps.

The common thread is one allowlist of trusted background apps, and ClearDeck needs to be on it. If protection keeps dying overnight, that list is the first place to look.

What ClearDeck deliberately does not do

ClearDeck does not fight Android with the usual tricks. There is no WakeLock, no AlarmManager, no WorkManager, no JobScheduler, and no boot-completed receiver in the app. The entire background story is one foreground service — the mechanism Android actually sanctions for work the user can see.

That keeps the app clean: it never wakes the phone just to keep itself alive, and it does not need special power locks. The flip side is that the OS, not the app, decides when the process may be reclaimed — which is why the notification matters so much, and why the OEM allowlists above are worth five minutes of your time.

Battery: the short version

Keeping the tunnel alive is cheap. Measured on a OnePlus 6T running Android 11, thirty minutes of protection cost about 20.67 seconds of CPU, or roughly 1.148% of a single core. The backgrounded interface used almost nothing. The full breakdown, and what the power-saving switch trades away, is in Power saving and battery use.

Next

• Power saving and battery use — the measured cost, and when it is worth turning the switch on
• When protection will not start — a second VPN app, an expired certificate, and other common causes

This guide is also available in 简体中文