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FAQ

Update profile automatically?​

Surfboard support update profiles automatically, even when app is in background.

It is achieved through defining a managed-config at the first line of the profile

#!MANAGED-CONFIG http://test.com/surge.conf interval=60 strict=true

High battery consumption?​

By default, Surfboard will take over the whole system's network traffic handling.

On some ROMs, the battery consumption of other applications due to the network transmission will be counted on Surfboard.

Please subjectively perceive whether the battery consumption has increased significantly after turning on Surfboard, instead of only referring to the battery consumption percentage displayed in the system settings.

How to reduce battery consumption?​

Please try to use bypass config in the 'tools' tab. Filtering/allowing some app traffic into VPN can reduce battery consumption.

caution

Use bypass config settings only if you know what are you doing. Incorrect configuration may cause some applications to not work properly

Analyzing network issues​

Please check the following entries:

Whether protocol defined in profile is supported​

Check the protocol supported list

Reset bypass config​

Uncheck all entries in bypass config

Try global outbound mode​

You can change outbound mode in the dashboard UI.

If global outbound mode is working, it may be caused by following issue:

  • DNS poisoning
  • Profile rules

Why not support these Surge standard​

MITM​

After Android 7.0, Google drop support for trusting custom CAs installed by user. MITM is only achieved on rooted devices after that.

USER-AGENT​

User-Agent info is only available on plaintext HTTP traffic or by MITM.

Since MITM is not achievable anymore and most of the traffic on the Internet today is based on https, support for USER-AGENT is impossible and unnecessary on Android platform.

URL-REGEX​

Just like USER-AGENT rule mention above, URL-REGEX is only achievable by MITM.

Why not support SSR/Trojan gRPC/VLESS/Xray/...​

Surfboard has always followed the Surge configuration format as a standard.

Similarly, Surfboard will try its best to support the protocol standards supported by Surge, but will not actively support protocols not supported by Surge to avoid the problem of standard fragmentation.

At the same time, I personally believe that blindly supporting as many protocols as possible will not bring additional benefits, but will increase the difficulty of application maintenance.

If you want to use a protocol that Surfboard does not support, please consider using other applications that support more complete protocols, such as Clash and V2rayNG, they are all very good applications.

Why speed test delay is higher than expected​

Surfboard use HTTP HEAD to make a node speed test just like Surge. The first speed test delay is always higher because there is no node's dns cache. Second run will be lower because dns query duration is removed due to existence of dns cache.

Devices with poor CPU will get higher delay also.

Why app prompt 'The imported profile contains an invalid update URL' when adding a new profile​

Surge format support update profile automatically if you have define a managed-config at the first line of the profile.

If profile contain an invalid managed config url, surfboard will raise a prompt like this to the user.

tip

99.99% of this situation is because the host of the url is a local address, for example: 127.0.0.1.

If you use some non-standard profile converters, you may encounter such issues. Please consider using other converters to circumvent this issues.