How to import a .ovpn file and connect
A .ovpn file is not something you open — it is imported into an OpenVPN client, which does the connecting. The client is free and official on every platform, and the whole thing takes about two minutes the first time. These guides cover that, and the handful of ways it goes wrong.
Import a .ovpn into OpenVPN Connect in one tap, or through the Files app when the tap does not take.
The one-tap handoff, the Downloads-folder route, and the two settings that quietly kill a connection an hour later.
OpenVPN GUI, Tunnelblick and the openvpn command — including credentials, autostart and the DNS leak nobody warns you about.
What none of them will do
None of these clients turn a free volunteer server into a private one. The tunnel encrypts the hop between your device and that server, and from there your traffic leaves under somebody else's IP address — somebody who can see where it is going. Is OpenVPN safe? works through exactly what that means, and it is worth five minutes before you connect to anything.
And a practical note that saves a lot of confusion: these servers are volunteer machines, so one will occasionally stop mid-session. That is not your setup being wrong. Pick another from the list — the score column exists so you can pick one that does it less often, and how it works explains what that number is made of.