When Lvcha VPN hits the device cap, a new phone is either refused (“too many devices”) or it silently knocks an older session offline. Sign in on a machine that still works, open the device list, drop a session you can confirm is junk, wait a minute, then try the new phone. A wrong password, a bad node, and a full quota do not present the same way on “the day I swapped handsets.”
This is for people who just bought a phone, share a plan at home, or bounce between a laptop and a tablet. Install steps stay in the setup guide. If the victim PC loses all internet, check Kill Switch before you reinstall. Builds come from the download page only.
Refusal versus mutual kick
Mutual kick: the new device works; the old one falls to Disconnected or “session expired” within two minutes. Refusal: the new device never leaves the login screen; the old one keeps working. Resetting the password because you mixed those two up will also sign out whoever is on a video call in the other room.
A third lookalike: the tray still says Connected while the browser times out. The server killed the token; the client has not heartbeated yet. With Kill Switch armed, that gap takes the whole NIC down and mimics connected but no traffic. Turn the switch off. If it immediately demands a login, you have a quota fight, not a DNS problem.
| What you see | Treat as | Do not start with |
|---|---|---|
| New phone blocked, old laptop fine | Hard cap | Swapping nodes |
| New phone works, old laptop drops | Mutual kick | Reinstalling the laptop app |
| Both dead, expiry copy on screen | Plan / billing lag | Kicking devices in a loop |
| One browser dead, VPN icon still up | Split tunnel or DNS | The device list |
What “one device” actually means on each OS
Windows counts the client under that Windows user, not the number of Ethernet ports. Install an Android emulator and sign in again, and the account page grows a second row. RDP into the office PC while the home copy is still running is two sessions. Sleep does not free a slot; a real sign-out can take 5–15 minutes to disappear from the list.
Android work profiles are a second UID. iPhone and iPad are always two. Family Sharing that dropped the app onto a kid’s iPad still consumes a slot even if nobody tapped Connect. macOS Migration Assistant cloning a disk onto a new Mac can leave both machines heartbeating. A VM (Parallels, VMware, Hyper-V) is another guest OS, another slot. Renaming the computer does not merge tokens.
Kick the landfill first
Sort by last seen. Match SM-G / Pixel / iPhone / DESKTOP- strings to hardware that still exists. Emulators, cloud phones, and the Android you sold last month go first. Do not guess at a machine that might be in a meeting—Kill Switch on that side will look like a WAN outage.
If there is only “sign out all sessions,” do that, then log in on the device in your hand, then the second one you still need. Do not tap login twenty times on the new phone; some endpoints treat that as abuse and freeze you for 10–30 minutes, which then looks like a password error.
Still over quota after a paid upgrade? The new cap often lands on a later billing callback. Read renewal sync instead of buying a second account the same afternoon.
Houses that share a login, and PCs that are not yours
Lvcha VPN is not a router license. Three “always on” endpoints will never fit a two-slot plan. Sign out of the office PC when you leave; do not auto-start on the kitchen tablet. Do not hang the family LAN behind one client session—that pattern also trips abuse checks and is outside this install guide.
If MDM forbids a third-party VPN, the device may never appear in the list; the OS blocks the extension. That is office network territory, not a slot you can squeeze. Skip “multi-open” cracked loaders.
Five mutual kicks on the same pair of devices: stop. Screenshot the counter, plan name, and last-seen times. Match them against the FAQ. New OS installs go through the guides, not a loop of overlay installers.
Prove the new phone and that the old one stays dead
After login, open https://1.1.1.1/help on the new device. The old one should show signed out. If it is still Connected with Kill Switch on, disconnect it by hand. If the counter fills again within a minute, a saved token is reconnecting in the background—find that process before you kick at random.
Write down the two devices allowed to stay, e.g. “Pixel + home Windows.” Version pins live on the download page (2026.07). Longer walkthroughs sit in the guide hub.