The Tor Project has announced Snowflake Volunteer, a new Android app that lets users donate a portion of their internet bandwidth to help people bypass online censorship.
The app is intended to expand the pool of volunteer-run Snowflake proxies while giving users control over battery, network, and connection usage.
Snowflake is a Tor pluggable transport that disguises a user’s traffic to resemble a video call, then routes it through short-lived proxies operated by volunteers. This makes connections harder for censors to identify and block than traffic sent through a fixed set of servers.
The app was developed by Bloco, an Android studio based in Portugal, after the company contacted Tor’s anti-censorship team about building a standalone Snowflake volunteering tool. The idea grew from Bloco’s work with the Open Observatory of Network Interference, or OONI, where its developers saw how activists and nongovernmental organizations rely on censorship-circumvention tools to stay connected.
Previously, users could operate Snowflake proxies through browser extensions, website embeds, a desktop command-line tool, or Orbot’s Kindness Mode on Android.
According to Tor, the Snowflake broker recorded an average of roughly 146,000 unique volunteer proxy IP addresses per day during the first half of 2026. About one-third were linked to Orbot’s Kindness Mode, which also shows users how many connections they have helped support.
That contribution suggested that a dedicated Android app could attract more volunteers.
Built for background operation
Snowflake Volunteer is based on mobile Tor components developed by the Guardian Project, including IPtProxy, a library that helps developers integrate Tor and its pluggable transports into mobile apps.
Using those existing components allowed Bloco to focus on reducing battery use, keeping the service active in the background, and making the app understandable to users who may not be familiar with Tor’s infrastructure.
Volunteers can configure the app to run only on unmetered networks such as Wi-Fi, activate only while the device is charging, and limit the number of people it helps at the same time.
Tor
Once enabled, the app checks in with the Snowflake broker and automatically connects users seeking a temporary proxy to the Tor network. Volunteers do not need to approve individual connections.
Available on Google Play and F-Droid
Snowflake Volunteer is available through Google Play and F-Droid, and its source code can also be downloaded and built independently.
Users interested in volunteering should consider their mobile data limits, battery use, local laws, and workplace or school network policies before enabling the service. Restricting the app to Wi-Fi and charging periods can reduce its impact on the device.
Volunteers should also install the app only from its official distribution pages and keep it updated to receive changes to Snowflake and Tor’s censorship-circumvention components.
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