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.

★ Traffic Privacy
Encrypted traffic from any app, through the Tor network, gives you the highest standard of security and privacy.

★ Stop Snooping
No extra eyes know what apps you are using, and when, or can stop you from using them.

★ No History
No central logging of your traffic history or IP address by your network operator and app servers.

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 official Tor VPN for Android. Orbot bounces your encrypted traffic several times through computers around the world, instead of connecting you directly like traditional 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 installed app can use Tor via the Orbot VPN feature, or if it has a proxy feature, using the settings found here: https://goo.gl/2OA1y Use Orbot with Twitter, or try private web searching with DuckDuckGo: https://goo.gl/lgh1p
★ 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***
★ 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

With VPN mode enabled, only 1 of 4 apps selected shows up on it's main screen as tor-enabled. And no refreshing in the apps list, closing and restarting orbot, or even restarting phone changes this. On my old phone (likely a previous version of orbot} I could close orbot and reopen it and the other apps would appear. Even hitting refresh from the store list screen would often work. Why did you guys break this? Are the other apps routing through it or not? No way to know! Not sure about this.

It functions fine, but eternally has this "orbot is connecting" notification that cannot be removed whether orbot is running or not, which is completely infuriating. /Edit/ Alright, this is ludicrous, as soon as I posted this review orbot decided to start itself. I shut it off, left the app, and now the "orbot is starting" notification won't leave again. And yes, I'm aware of the background connection and notification settings; they flat out don't change anything. Uninstalled.

It worked perfect the 1st and 2nd time I used it. After that it didn't work at all and actually prevented me from connecting to the internet. This was all done on the same internet connection within the span of 2 days. Nothing changed, no settings or configurations. It just randomly stopped working

What’s new

update to tor 0.4.8.12
update to latest pluggable transports (snowflake, lyrebird)
add new and updated translations