guardianproject / orbot-android

Orbot *Android Onion Routing Robot* (CI docs) 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 a crucial component of the Guardian Project, an initiative that leads an effort to develop a secure and anonymous smartphone. This platform is designed for use by human rights activists, journalists and others around the world. Learn more: Tor protects your privacy on the internet by hiding the connection between your Internet address and the services you use. We believe that Tor is reasonably secure, but please ensure you read the usage instructions and learn to configure it properly. Learn more: Download the Latest Orbot Release Tor FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) Please Contribute Your Translations Build Instructions Orbot can be built with or Android Studio like most every other Android app. However these steps listed below need to be completed once before Orbot can be built successfully. Use Java 25 Toolchain For Java+Kotlin Projects Orbot now uses Java 25 which is the latest Java LTS replacing the Java 21 LTS we had been using for some time. If you are unable to build Orbot becuase you don't have Java 25 installed/configured, or even if you aren't sure which version of Java is being used, run the script once from the root of the repository to be able to configure Java 25 for Orobt's Gradle project. This creates a file which specifies that we are to use version 25 of the Java toolchain. The script then uses the new gradle feature to automatically populate the file with additional details Gradle uses to obtain the corect Java 25 Toolchain for your machine (OS and CPU architecutre) and to automatically use this new toolchain in subsequent builds of Orobt. After this is done, you should be able to build Orbot again using Android Studio or via the command line: Obtaining Native Code Dependency Orbot is built with hev-socks5-tunnel. Before you can build Orbot, you'll need to clone the submodule for this dependency. Once cloned, Android Studio + Gradle will take care of building the C code. Or, if you already cloned the repo: If, sometime later, you pull new commits to Orbot an and see that there are changes to that means that the version we use in Orbot has been updated. You will have to update to the new version of by running: Viewing Logs Recently was added to be its own Linux process on Android instead of having it run within the primary app process. That measn that you will no longer see logs from , , etc within Android Studio. In order to see these logs you can use: to see the app logs in your terminal and to see the process logs. **There is a helper script to get both of these logs printed side-by-side with . From the root directory run: You may need to initially do some configuration to obtain and add to your : **Copyright © 2009-2026, Nathan Freitas, The Guardian Project**