Orbot: Tor for Android

The Tor Project

About this app

Orbot is a free VPN and proxy app that empowers other apps to use the internet more securely. Orbot uses Tor to encrypt your Internet traffic and then hides it by bouncing through a series of computers around the world. Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

Orbot is the only app that creates a truly private internet connection. As the New York Times writes, “when a communication arrives from Tor, you can never know where or whom it’s from.”

Tor won the 2012 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award.

★ ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES: Orbot is the safest way to use the Internet on Android. Period. Orbot bounces your encrypted traffic several times through computers around the world, instead of connecting you directly like other VPNs and proxies. This process takes a little longer, but the strongest privacy and identity protection available is worth the wait.
★ PRIVACY FOR APPS: Any app can be routed over Tor via the Orbot VPN feature
★ PRIVACY FOR EVERYONE: Orbot prevents someone watching your connection from knowing what apps you are using or websites you visit. All anyone monitoring your network traffic can see is that you're using Tor.

***We Love Feedback***
★ LEARN MORE: Learn more about Orbot and get involved at https://orbot.app
★ ABOUT US: Guardian Project is a group of developers that make secure mobile apps and open-source code for a better tomorrow.
★ OPEN-SOURCE: Orbot is free software. Take a look at our source code, or join the community to make it better: https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot
★ MESSAGE US: Are we missing your favorite feature? Found an annoying bug? We’d love to hear from you! Send us an email: [e-mail]

***Disclaimer***
Guardian Project makes apps that are designed to protect your security and anonymity. The protocols that we use are widely regarded as the state of the art in security technology. While we are constantly upgrading our software to combat the latest threats and eliminate bugs, no technology is 100% foolproof. For maximum security and anonymity users must utilize best practices to keep themselves safe. You can find a good introductory guide to these topics at https://securityinabox.org

Ratings and reviews

The concept is good, but the software is terrible. It's riddled with bugs and extremely difficult to use. I don't know why the kind mode inexplicably stops working, or why the network connection status frequently fails to update. Besides, the UI often malfunctions and seems inconsistent with the backend. Furthermore, there are no error messages displayed after problems occur.

Kindness Mode is awesome! Please fix the bug where Orbot reports to having: "High system resource usage". Hello, I would like to report a bug that is causing problems. When I only keep "Kindness Mode" turned ON and run a separate VPN, when I simply open Orbot to check my Kindness Mode totals, it will automatically turn off the VPN that I'm running in the background. Can you fix and prevent this from happening? Why does my TOR connection randomly disconnect? I find myself having to connect again.

The app won't open, it'll open to a blank screen, then close immediately. I'll have to do this 5-6 times before I can turn it off due to random websites like Netflix or smaller sites like YouTube saying I'm under strange geo-restriction that shouldn't be there, even when switching locations. Some sites somehow know my location after clearing all cache, website data, etc, etc, and showing vpn is connected, with settings showing apps it's to work with are set correctly. It work then it may not

What’s new

- updated to tor 0.4.8.19
- new, improved VPN code (hev-socks)
- latest updated snowflake, lyrebird pluggable transports