VPN by Google is beginning to work on the Pixel Tablet

When VPN by Google rolled out to older Pixel phones in June, the Pixel Tablet was excluded, though that might be changing. 

Officially, this Pixel-exclusive VPN is available for the Pixel 7 and newer. The Tablet was not included in that Feature Drop list, but Google never mentioned VPN access when selling the device device.

When Google started rolling it out, the app was briefly installable on the Pixel Tablet via the Play Store. The connection worked until Google disabled the Tablet from signing in via a server-side update. Meanwhile, the Google Play listing said the Pixel Tablet was an incompatible device.

Over the past week, Pixel Tablet owners (on the Android 15 November patch, stable) that still have “VPN by Google” installed, or if you sideload, noticed it working. It auto-establishes a connection on device restart/power up and the settings page fully works. As of today, we’re still seeing a “This tablet isn’t compatible with this app” message on the Play Store.

Another dimension to this are user reports (via Android Authority) of VPN by Google being pre-installed on the Pixel Tablet with Android 15 QPR2 Beta 1 and that “the service’s Play Store listing no longer lists the tablet as incompatible.”

We’re seeing the first half of that, but haven’t been able to replicate the Google Play aspect of this change (as seen below), while the Pixel Tablet did not get a VPN by Google update (1.0.678725851 vs. 1.0.675199660) that’s widely rolling out to phones this morning.