App is inaccessible in Mainland China without a VPN

[GeoYWang]

The application appears to be unable to connect to its servers from within mainland China, making it impossible to detect the user's public IP address. This issue occurs across all 3 Chinese Internet Service Providers. But it functions correctly if I enable a VPN or a proxy tool like Clash. However, this defeats the purpose for users who wish to check their native public IP address, as the app then only shows the IP of the VPN or proxy server. This behavior strongly suggests that the backend server or endpoint used by the app for IP detection is likely blocked by the Great Firewall in China.

Perhaps you could consider using alternative or backup endpoints that are accessible from within mainland China to resolve this issue for users in my country?

Thank you for your great work on this application~

[maksimowiczm]

Thank you!

I think the app should allow users to choose other servers. However, giving users full control could also introduce new issues. For example, what happens if a user provides an "invalid" server like google.com? The app would download the content and store it in the local database, essentially turning it into a scraper/spam bot. I think this is acceptable as long as it only happens when the user does it intentionally. Still, we should provide users with safe default servers in addition to ipify.

[GeoYWang]

I agree with you — providing a backup server should be enough, no need to let users input arbitrary endpoints (which could indeed cause abuse or unexpected scraping issues). For reference, in mainland China I often use https://ip.skk.moe to check my own IP address. I'm not sure if they provide an API endpoint, but it’s very stable to access here. Another option is https://ipapi.co , which, while not hosted in China, is currently accessible without VPN and offers a free quota for API requests.

Perhaps the app could default to ipify, and if unreachable, automatically fall back to one of these alternatives. Thanks again for considering~

[maksimowiczm]

I looked into https://ip.skk.moe, and it uses these providers. I haven’t checked their terms of use yet, but they’re probably good candidates to include in the app

• https://api-v3.speedtest.cn/ip
• https://myip.ipip.net
• https://api.ip.sb/geoip
• https://ipinfo.io/json