Snowflake Volunteer open-source app
Help circumvent censorship with Snowflake Volunteer
The Tor network is an invaluable tool for circumventing censorship and staying anonymous online. And that’s why it’s blocked in several countries and regions around world. The community has come up with different ways of overcoming that through bridges to access the Tor network. Snowflake is one of those technologies, disguising traffic as an audio or video call. But to work, Snowflake needs volunteers to run proxies on their own unblocked network.
How can you be a volunteer?
There are already browser extensions, a CLI, a website embed script. And the Orbot, a Tor VPN Android app, has kindness mode that you can enable.
But we decided to build a standalone Android app for running a Snowflake proxy, and called it Snowflake Volunteer. Install it on an Android device, configure it to run as you would like (only on WiFi or charging), and leave it to do its thing. It automatically searches for people looking for help and proxies their connection with Tor.
How to get it?
Source code is available too, if you want to build the app yourself.
Can I help?
Besides running the app on your Android devices, you can report bugs and suggest new features by opening a new issue on the repository. And we’re also looking for translators for the app on Weblate. Thanks to volunteers, the translations have already started for Portuguese, French, Japanese and Turkish. ❤️