The main supported methods are HttpUrlConnection, OkHttp3, HttpClient, and Volley. On the NetCipher library gitlab page you can see examples provided for many different Android HTTP libraries. However, since Orbot integration is much simpler than adding a Tor daemon to our app we will use that instead. This gives Tor Browser users across different platforms a familiar all-in-on experience. The current official Tor Browser for Android does away with NetCipher and Orbot as a requirement, opting to bundle Tor within the application itself. It’s analogous to how the Tor Browser bundle launches a Tor service in the background. NetCipher provides, among other things, an OrbotHelper utility class that lets your app check if Orbot is installed, prompt the user to install it easily, and automatically launch Orbot in the background when your app launches. However, forcing a user to install and launch Orbot before running your app is not a friendly experience. They are the team behind the officially endorsed Tor Browser for Android, and the Orfox+Orbot combo that came before it.

Orbot is developed by the Guardian Project, who create and maintain many privacy oriented apps for Android. You can think of it as running the Tor service on your phone, the same as you would on any other Linux system. Orbot is a free application for Android that acts as a Tor proxy for your device. Orbot, NetCipher, and the Guardian Project We’ll assume you have a basic familiarity with Tor and Android app development. Backgroundįirst, let’s take a look at the different building blocks we’ll need to make calls to a hidden service from our app. If you don’t care about the background, go ahead and skip to the “Implementation” part below.

We are sharing our notes here in case anyone else wants to see how to add this support to their application.

As it turns out, there is not a lot of well documented ways to do this seemingly straightforward task. We also needed a mobile application to interact with that hidden service through a JSON API. We were building a proof of concept in the Innovation and Laboratory Area as part of the architecture needed to create a Tor hidden service.

Orbot browser