Installing WrapVPN on your Mac

There's no separate Mac download to hunt for. WrapVPN is a single App Store app, and the listing you find on your Mac is the one an iPhone owner sees. Installing it there gives you the Mac version, on any Mac running macOS 12 or later.

The practical upside is that there's nothing to buy twice. A plan belongs to your WrapVPN account rather than to a device, so if you already subscribe on your iPhone, signing in on the Mac with the same account is all it takes.

Do use the same sign-in you used before. An Apple sign-in that hides your email address and a Google sign-in can end up as two separate accounts, and your plan only lives in one of them.

The first time you connect, macOS stops and asks whether WrapVPN may add a VPN configuration. The request comes from macOS, not from us, and it may ask for your password or Touch ID to confirm.

The reason is easy to accept once you see it. A VPN sits between your Mac and everything it talks to, so macOS wants the person at the keyboard to agree to it. It's like asking the post office to redirect all your mail: they want to hear it from you, not from the company doing the forwarding.

Approve it once and that's it. There's no separate extension to allow and nothing else to switch on in System Settings. The configuration then appears in the Mac's network settings under the name WrapVPN, which is a handy place to check the connection without opening the app.

If you decline by mistake, nothing is saved and nothing breaks. The next time you connect, macOS simply asks again.

Laptops move, and that's where a VPN earns its keep. Follow one MacBook through a Tuesday. It starts on your home Wi-Fi in Madrid, where you connect to the Madrid location because the nearest location is usually the fastest.

At half past eight you close the lid and catch the bus. When you open it again at the office and the Mac joins a different Wi-Fi network, WrapVPN carries on over the new one. WireGuard, the technology WrapVPN is built on, only needs a quick exchange of keys to pick up again, so a new network doesn't mean starting over.

At lunchtime you move to a café. Its Wi-Fi has a sign-in page, and until you complete it the network lets nothing else through, the VPN included. Disconnect, finish the page in your browser, then connect again.

In the afternoon the café Wi-Fi gives up and you share your phone's connection instead. The phone's VPN covers the phone, not the laptop borrowing its hotspot, so it's the Mac's own copy of WrapVPN that keeps the laptop protected. That, more than anything, is the reason to install it on the Mac at all.

Clean Web, our ad and tracker blocker, starts switched off on the Mac. Turn it on in Settings and the Mac stops looking up the addresses of known advertising and tracking domains, in every app that uses its normal lookups, so those connections never begin.

It has the usual limits: a browser set to use its own secure DNS goes around it, and it blocks by domain name rather than inspecting pages, so it's no substitute for antivirus.

Pause is for the rare moment when something needs your ordinary connection. It stops protection for a few minutes and then resumes by itself, without you having to remember.

If your Mac runs macOS 12 or later, open the App Store, install WrapVPN and sign in with the account from your phone. Connect once at home, approve the macOS request, and the laptop is ready for wherever Tuesday takes it.