guardianproject/orbot-android

Orbot is a crucial component of the Guardian Project, an initiative that leads an effort to develop a secure and anonymous smartphone. This platform is designed for use by human rights activists, journalists and others around the world. Learn more: https://guardianproject.info/

Tor protects your privacy on the internet by hiding the connection between your Internet address and the services you use. We believe that Tor is reasonably secure, but please ensure you read the usage instructions and learn to configure it properly. Learn more: https://torproject.org/

Build Instructions

Obtaining hev-socks5-tunnel Native Code Dependency

Orbot is built with hev-socks5-tunnel. Before you can build Orbot, you'll need to clone the submodule for this dependency. Once cloned, Android Studio + Gradle will take care of building the C code.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot-android
# you should be good to go building Orbot
cd orbot-android 
# build a debug APK of orbot
./gradlew assembleFullpermDebug

Or, if you already cloned the repo:

cd orbot-android
git pull
git submodule update --init --recursive
# build a debug APK of orbot 
./gradlew assembleFullpermDebug

If, sometime later, you pull new commits to Orbot an and see that there are changes to app/src/main/jni/hev-socks5-tunnel that means that the hev-socks5-tunnel version we use in Orbot has been updated. You will have to update to the new version of hev-socks5-tunnel by running:

# update to the new version of hev-socks5-tunnel Orbot uses
git submodule update --init --recursive

# you should no longer see that there are changes to hev-socks5-tunnel in git...
git status 

Viewing Logs

Recently tor was added to be its own Linux process on Android instead of having it run within the primary app process. That means that you will no longer see logs from tor, OrbotService, OrbotVPNManager, etc. within Android Studio. In order to see these logs you can use:

adb logcat --pid=$(adb shell pidof -s "org.torproject.android.debug") -v color to see the app logs in your terminal

adb logcat --pid=$(adb shell pidof -s "org.torproject.android.debug:tor") -v color and to see the tor process logs.

**There is a helper script to get both of these logs printed side-by-side with tmux. From the root directory run:

./scripts/view_logs_tmux.sh

You may need to initially do some configuration to obtain tmux and add adb to your PATH:

# on Mac OS 
brew install tmux 


# on debian + friends:
sudo apt intstall tmux 

# then make sure adb is in your path in your .bashrc or similar file:
export ANDROID_HOME=~/Android/Sdk
export PATH=$PATH:$ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools


# on mac you do the above or you can get a copy of adb via homebrew...
brew install android-platform-tools

Checking for Android updates

./gradlew versionCatalogUpdate --check

Copyright © 2009-2026, Nathan Freitas, The Guardian Project