I run blokada on my phone, which also acts as a pseudo vpn, and that does have problems with dying randomly and needing to be restarted. not sure if it's a bug in the software or a general android issue.

Perhaps Blokada doesn't properly run the background service, with a persistent notification. The notification is necessary since around Android 9 or so—and while NetGuard's ‘vpn’ is indicated in the status bar, it also still has a notification.

no, it has a persistent notification, but maybe they do something else wrong if other vpns work fine

By the way: I semi-randomly landed again on the dontkillmyapp site, and it notes that killing background apps works differently on different phones—presumably first of all between various manufacturers, since they tend to modify Android somewhat deeply: https://dontkillmyapp.com/google

More to the point, the site reminded me that you might want to verify if Blokada is exempted from ‘battery optimizations’ (works via app info —> ‘Battery’ —> ‘Battery optimization’ for me). I checked NetGuard on my phone, and sure enough I have the ‘optimization’ disabled for the app.

(Let me know if you see this comment, or I'm gonna notify you manually.)

hey, thanks for following up! I checked and blokada is set to "unrestricted battery use", so I'm going to guess it's just buggy (the previous version didn't have this issue)