The Snowflake Volunteer Android app lets anyone with a smartphone donate a slice of their internet connection to people who are blocked from accessing the Tor network by their governments. Developed by TechRadar-covered Portuguese Android app studio Bloco in partnership with the Tor Project, it is available now on the Google Play Store and on F-Droid.
The app is not about protecting your own browsing. It is about lending your connection to someone else who cannot get online freely. Switch it on, leave your phone alone, and people in countries where Tor is blocked can use your device as an entry point to the network. That is the whole deal.
Why Tor gets blocked and how Snowflake Volunteer Android app gets around it
Governments that want to block the Tor Project‘s browser do so by refusing access to the relay nodes that route traffic. The relay directory is public, which makes it blockable. Snowflake sidesteps this by disguising connections as standard video calls over the WebRTC protocol, which is not typically restricted. From there, a connection to the Tor network can be made without the usual giveaways.
Even when individual Snowflake bridges are detected and blocked, new ones keep appearing. The Tor Project describes this as making it virtually impossible for a government to shut down this method without crippling much of the general internet in their country. Your device is simply the entry point: users go through several more nodes before any actual browsing happens.
Crucially, you cannot see what connecting users are doing, and they cannot learn anything about you. The app is not capable of surveillance in either direction. To any state monitoring traffic, you look like someone on a standard audio or video call, with no static list of IP addresses to block.
Built on existing mobile Tor foundations
The Bloco studio did not start entirely from scratch. According to The Tor Project’s own blog, the team built on foundations already developed by the Guardian Project for the mobile Tor ecosystem, including a component called IPtProxy. That existing groundwork means the app arrives in a polished, stable state rather than as an early-stage experiment.
The same multiple layers of encryption that protect the full Tor network are in place throughout, so the privacy protections are not watered down just because the connection is coming through someone’s phone on a wifi network in, say, Ancoats.
What using it actually feels like
The setup is minimal. Once installed, the app asks you to exempt it from your phone’s battery management rules so it stays active in the background, then walks you through that process. After that, a single toggle on the main screen is all it takes. No account, no configuration, nothing to configure manually.
In around four hours of use, the app recorded six connections, sending a total of 3.2 megabytes and receiving 17 megabytes. That is a modest footprint. No noticeable battery drain, no slowdown, no sudden flood of users. The app keeps a running tally of connections and data transferred, which gives you some sense of the cumulative effect over time.
A settings menu (the cog, top right) lets you restrict connections to unmetered networks such as wifi, or only when the phone is charging. You can also cap how many users your device supports simultaneously. These are practical limits rather than privacy settings, designed to keep the impact on your phone manageable.
If you want to contribute without using your phone, there is a desktop browser add-on that does the same job. iOS users can enable Kindness Mode in the Orbot app, which connects to the Tor network as a VPN. Snowflake Volunteer is one option among a few, but it is probably the most hands-off of the lot: install it, leave it running overnight, and get on with things.
