Pierluigi Paganini May 23, 2019

Tor Browser for Android is now available on the Play Store, this is a great result for experts that everyday fight to defend human rights and privacy online.

The Tor Project announced on Tuesday that the Tor Browser version Tor Browser 8.5 for Android is finally available on the Google Play Store.

“Tor Browser 8.5 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory. The Android version is also available from Google Play and should be available from F-Droid within the next day.” reads the official announcement published by the Tor Project.

“This release features important security updates to Firefox. After months of work and including feedback from our users, Tor Browser 8.5 includes our first stable release for Android plus many new features across platforms.”

Tor is free and open-source software that allows anonymous communication, it directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network consisting of more than seven thousand relays. With this architecture, it allows hiding user’s IP address. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity to the user: this includes “visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms”

Tor Browser is an essential tool for activists, journalists, and for all those people that use it to circumvent censorship.

Before the release of Tor Browser for Android, it was possible to access the Tor network using other apps like Orbot/Orfox app.

Now it is possible to access the network by using the official Tor Browser for Android that is built on Firefox.

Maintainers at the Tor project promise the same level of security implemented in the Desktop version to the Android platform as well.

Tor Browser 8.5 implements a number of known issues, below the most important ones:

1. While we improved accessibility support for Windows users during our 8.5 stabilization, it’s still not perfect. We are in the process of finishing patches for inclusion in an 8.5 point release. We are close here.
2. There are bug reports about WebGL related fingerprinting which we are investigating. We are currently testing a fix for the most problematic issue and will ship that in the next point release.
3. The upgrade to Tor Browser 8.5 broke saved logins and passwords. We are investigating this bug and hope to provide a fix in an upcoming point release.

Anyway, the Tor Project developers explained that the mobile version of the Tor Browser does not include all the features of the desktop version,

“While there are still feature gaps between the desktop and Android Tor Browser, we are confident that Tor Browser for Android provides essentially the same protections that can be found on desktop platforms,” the Tor Project concludes.

In the notification area of your Android device, Tor Browser gives a quick, “New Identity” button that allows you to immediately clean the instance of your Tor network, with various caches and other information, without reopening the app or restarting the Tor onion network.

What about an iOS version?

The Tor Project is still not able to develop a version for the iOS platform because Apple continues to restrict all third-party browsers and forces browser companies to use its own engine. Tor users can anonymize their navigation using the Onion Browser.

If you appreciate my effort in spreading cybersecurity awareness, please vote for Security Affairs in the section “Your Vote for the Best EU Security Tweeter”

Thank you

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Tor Browser, Android)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]