How to set up a proxy on your smartphone with Super Proxy

Running a second Telegram account from the same phone is where most people first hit a proxy requirement, because messengers, marketplaces and ad platforms all treat the IP address as an identity signal. The phone is now where those checks land: DataReportal's Digital 2026 mid-year figures put 96.2% of internet users online from a mobile phone at least part of the time, against 7.64 billion smartphones in active use. Android gives you two routes to a proxy: the fields buried inside each Wi-Fi network, or a dedicated app. Both are covered below, along with the exact point where each one stops working.

How to connect proxy on your phone

As said, there are two easy ways to set up a proxy on your smartphone. Here are their features:

1. Manual setup in Wi-Fi settings. Long-press the network, open advanced options, then enter a host and a port. Two limits make this useless for private proxies. Android's ProxyInfo class stores only a host, a port and an exclusion list (or a PAC URL), with no field for credentials, so a proxy that needs a login fails without an obvious error. The setting also belongs to that one network profile: switch SSID or drop to mobile data and your traffic leaves unproxied. There is no system-wide proxy switch for cellular; the only native option there is editing APN fields, which carriers frequently overwrite.
2.  A proxy app. It removes all three limits at once: unlimited named profiles, a username and password field, SOCKS5 alongside HTTP, and traffic captured at the VPN layer rather than in the network profile, so the tunnel survives a move from Wi-Fi to LTE. Switching between accounts becomes two taps instead of a trip through settings. The trade-off is that one app now sees every connection the phone makes, which is why the choice of app, and of who supplies the proxies behind it, matters more than the setup itself.

Table 1. The three routing options on Android 6.0 and newer, checked in August 2026.

Super Proxy is the app this guide uses, and its install base is the practical reason: the Google Play listing shows more than 1 million downloads and a 4.0 rating from 2,970 reviews, while AppBrain's tracker records roughly 3 million downloads in total and 130,000 in the last 30 days. Version 3.2.2 was updated on 23 April 2026, needs Android 6.0 or newer and weighs 37 MB. That release cadence matters more than the download count: proxy tunnelling breaks with OS updates, and an abandoned app breaks silently.

What Super Proxy can do

Super Proxy is not a VPN service and ships no proxies of its own. It raises a local VPN interface on the device and forwards traffic to whatever HTTP or SOCKS5 endpoint you enter, using the HTTP CONNECT method for the former; root access is not required. According to the official product page, the connection to the proxy can additionally be wrapped in SSL/TLS, although that feature exists only in the Android build, profiles are unlimited and can be exported and imported, and Android TV is supported. The developer reports over 100,000 daily users.

Here are the main features of Super Proxy:

• Add and manage proxy servers for different applications.
• Supports HTTP and SOCKS protocols; both work in the free version, and SOCKS5 no longer requires a paid tier.
• You can use proxies with authentication (login and password). This is mandatory if you use private proxies.
• Easy to use - no complicated settings. You only need to enter IP, port, login and password, and then start the profile. A minute's work.
• Unlimited profiles with export and import, a real-time connection log, and a paid tier that adds a home-screen widget, a quick settings tile, app-based firewall rules, per-app proxy bypass and dark mode.

Super Proxy is great for working in networks with restrictions and managing multiple accounts, such as Telegram. In practice this means one profile per account, switched from the list before you open the app in question. It is a poor fit for two cases: streaming, where the extra hop adds latency you can feel, and any workflow that needs a second VPN active at the same time, since the operating system grants only one tunnel. For a proxy that authenticates by IP whitelist on a fixed home network, the Wi-Fi fields still work and need no app at all.

What about DNS and WebRTC leaks? All DNS names are resolved through the proxy, UDP is blocked, and every TCP connection is forced into the tunnel. Because WebRTC discovers your public address over STUN, and STUN runs on UDP, the browser cannot reach a STUN server at all. Stefan Scheler, the app's developer at SCHELER Software, put it plainly in a Play Store reply of 22 March 2026: "STUN is completely blocked because only TCP connections are forwarded via the proxy." A leak test showing a 10.x.x.x address is reporting the app's own virtual interface, not your real network.

Does it work on iPhone? Yes, since 2024, and the two builds are not identical. The App Store listing requires iOS 17.0 or later, holds a 4.1 rating from 243 ratings, and sells Super Proxy Pro as an in-app purchase at $6.99 and $7.99. Version 3.2.1 arrived on 11 April. Three gaps matter before you commit an iPhone workflow: TLS encryption between the app and your proxy is Android-only, so an unencrypted HTTP proxy stays unencrypted on the first hop; UDP over SOCKS5 exists only in the Android beta channel; and iOS has no equivalent of the kill switch described below.

Where does the app stop helping? It gives no anonymity of its own: traffic through a plain HTTP proxy is visible to whoever runs that proxy unless the source app already encrypts it, and device fingerprints are untouched. Android and iOS also allow one active VPN tunnel at a time, so a corporate VPN or an ad blocker built on a local VPN will fight the proxy for that slot. There is no kill-switch button either; if the tunnel drops, traffic continues over your real IP until you notice.

How do you close that gap? Android can do it, the app cannot. The developer's FAQ explains why: since Android 10 an app is no longer allowed to switch the wireless connection off programmatically, so the only working kill switch is the system one, configured once and left on. Set it up before you start any account work rather than after the first drop, because the disconnect that exposes your real address usually happens while the screen is off and nobody is watching the status bar.

1. Open the device settings and find the Always-on VPN section.
2. Locate Super Proxy in the list and tap its settings icon.
3. Switch on Always-on VPN.
4. Switch on Block connections without VPN, which is the kill switch itself.

Before you install: test the proxy from a desktop

Why test first? The app shows the same endless spinner for a dead proxy, a wrong password and a blocked port, so diagnosing inside the app wastes time. Run the two commands below from any computer, substituting your own credentials and address. If the first returns the proxy's address and the second times out, that port has no SOCKS5 and you should pick HTTP in the profile. If both fail, the credentials or the IP whitelist are wrong and the phone has nothing to do with it.

1.      Check the HTTP endpoint:

curl -x http://login:pass@IP:PORT https://api.ipify.org -m 10

2.      Check the same port over SOCKS5:

curl -x socks5h://login:pass@IP:PORT https://api.ipify.org -m 10

Which authentication type should you order for a phone? Login and password, always. IP-whitelist authorisation ties access to your current address, and a phone on mobile data sits behind carrier-grade NAT, where the public address changes without warning and is shared with other subscribers. A whitelist entry that works during setup can stop working an hour later, and the failure looks exactly like a dead proxy. Credentials are also the only method the app can pass on your behalf, since it completes the proxy authentication handshake for every application on the device.

Super Proxy setup instructions

Let's see how to customize the app on your smartphone.

1. Find Super Proxy in Play Market, download and install.

   

2. After that, open the application.
3. From the Super Proxy main menu, click on the "Add Proxy" button in the lower right corner of the screen. A window to add a proxy will appear.

   

4. Enter the proxy data:

a) In the "Profile Name" field, come up with a name for the proxy so that it is easy to find. A machine-readable pattern such as acct12_ig_de_87 pays off once you pass ten profiles, because the list is flat and has no search box.

b) In the "Protocol" section, choose HTTP or SOCKS5 to match what your provider issued. Both are available without payment in version 3.2.2, so the old rule about HTTP being the only free option no longer applies. If you are unsure which the port answers, the curl test above tells you.

c) Enter the IP of the proxy in the "Server" field and the port in the "Port" field.

d) Enter login and password in the "Username/Password" field.

5. To save your proxy, click on the floppy disk icon in the upper right corner. Now your profile is ready to go!

   

6. To activate the proxy, go back to the main screen of the application, select the desired profile and press "Start".

   

With the profile running, verify the tunnel in four checks:

1. Open a browser and compare your address on an IP-checking page with the proxy you entered. They must match.
2. Run a DNS leak test in the same browser. Every resolver listed should sit behind the proxy, not behind your carrier.
3. Run a WebRTC test. A 10.x.x.x address is the app's own virtual interface and is harmless; any public address that is not the proxy is a real leak.
4. Turn Wi-Fi off, wait ten seconds for the handover to mobile data, then repeat check 1. A handover can leave the tunnel looking connected while traffic already flows around it.

Keeping the tunnel alive

Why does the proxy stop overnight? Samsung's One UI and Xiaomi's HyperOS suspend background processes aggressively, and the tunnel runs as a foreground service that these layers still terminate when the screen stays off. The symptom is specific: in the morning the phone has internet, the app looks idle, and the IP is your own again. Fix it by removing battery restrictions for Super Proxy and allowing autostart in the manufacturer's own settings menu, which sits apart from the standard Android battery screen and is not affected by it.

What gives the setup away even when the IP is clean? The device clock. Apps read the system time zone and locale directly, never through the network, so a German exit node paired with UTC+3 and a Russian interface language is a mismatch visible without any fingerprinting tooling. Turn off automatic time zone and set it to match the proxy's country. In the same pass, use the per-app bypass to keep banking apps, government services and your carrier's own app outside the tunnel, where a foreign address only triggers extra verification.

Why does a working proxy still get challenged? Because platforms are filtering far more automation than before. Imperva's 2026 Bad Bot Report found that automated traffic passed 53% of all web traffic during 2025, up from 51% a year earlier, with 27% of bot attacks aimed at APIs. Defences tuned against that volume will occasionally challenge an ordinary session too. Plan for it: retry a failed action twice with a pause instead of switching proxy immediately, and change the IP only when the same address fails repeatedly.

How do you handle more than a handful of accounts? Set the profiles up once on a single device, export them to a file, then import that file on the rest, since the app supports export and import of the full profile list. Keep one IP per account and never reuse an address across two profiles: the moment two accounts share an exit node, the platform can link them. Store the exported file somewhere encrypted, because it contains every proxy credential you own in plain form.

Table 2. Symptoms in the order you are likely to meet them, with the check that resolves each one.

One last habit worth keeping: re-run the four checks above after every OS update. The app's own version history records a release that fixed a connection failure introduced by iOS 18.1, and the kill-switch limitation described earlier arrived with Android 10. Mobile operating systems change tunnelling behaviour without announcing it, and the failure mode is silent. Five minutes of verification after an update costs less than finding the leak through a locked account.