It’s here! We’d like to officially announce the release of Orbot to the Android Market. After going beta back in March, we’ve seriously re-doubled our efforts for this release. By releasing Orbot to the Android Market, we suspect that our user base will eventually evolve towards the more ‘every day’ Android user – so our goal has been to create an experience that is simple yet informative, straightforward yet powerful. As a step towards that goal, we’ve spent some time creating a new setup wizard at Orbot start-up that walks you through the basics of what Orbot does and does not do. The last thing we want is for someone to be endangered because they didn’t understand how to protect themselves.
We’ve also spent the time fixing bugs, patching potential security holes, and bringing a bunch of new features to Orbot, including:
- ‘Start on boot’ option <– set to ‘on’ by default
- Support for Hidden Services (!!)
- Re-designed per-app torification and application settings
- Easy access to the official Tor ‘check’ site through application menu
- …not to mention a complete application architecture overhaul! (hopefully translating to increased stability)
We’re especially excited about Hidden Services support in this release, and we’ve been hacking away at a proof of concept application that shows how powerful this tool can become – hopefully we will be posting about it soon.
So now for the juicy stuff. Grab the 1.0 release from the doubletwist Android web app store here, by scanning the QR Code below, or just searching the Market for ‘Orbot.’
If you’re new to the Guardian Project, we’d like to make sure you know that all of our official builds are available from the Tor website. We’re also proud to be an open-source project – if you’d like to read more about Orbot or would like to reproduce our builds from source, check out the subversion repository.
As always we’d like to thank the dedicated team of developers, testers and enthusiasts that have provided feedback throughout Orbot’s development. We’ve tested on Android 1.x and 2.x devices such as the MyTouch, Nexus One and Motorola Droid [we also did port to a Nook 😉 ] – so we’d love to get feedback on performance and functionality on any and all of the ever growing family of Android devices. Please report bugs and feedback here.