What I've noticed is that if you pay for premium service, the apps keep the connection up way better and offer nice features, like switching your country from an easy menu.

Tha being said I've been quite happy with http://privateinternetaccess.com/. A good Android client, fast, don't ask any personal information when you register, they say no logging, the Android app doesn't ask any permissions and so on. I can choose the key length and additionally block all connections if the VPN is not connected.

That was my thoughts. My guess is that people are falling for "FREE VPN NOW!!!" type apps. Running your own VPN is easy for the HN crowd, but well beyond most users. I'm lucky enough to get a free, highspeed VPN via my ISP, but I suspect that is very uncommon as well.

In my case, it's because I've found IPSec considerably more of a pain to set up and maintain than OpenVPN, which iOS doesn't natively support. (I don't think Android does, either.)

In the general case, it's because most folks don't have the knowledge and skill required to set up either - nor should they have to.

With the increasing adoption of IoT devices and their generally crap (but not actively malicious) security, it would seem like a no-brainer for ISPs to offer VPN capability on the CPE as part of the basic service package, with UPnP configured to expose on the VPN interface rather than the public one, and with dynamic name resolution included to make configuration an easy one-time process. It'd help with customer retention, I think, and it'd surely improve network stability and throughput by reducing the quantity of attack traffic.

> Why would you need a third party app on Android?

Because the consensus seems to be that if you use any VPN besides OpenVPN you're a moron, and therefore some build-in solutions for some OSes only support OpenVPN.