The Snowflake Volunteer Android app is now live on the Google Play Store, giving anyone with a smartphone the ability to help people in censored countries access the Tor Network, with no technical knowledge required.
Built by Portuguese app studio Bloco in partnership with the Tor Project and the Guardian Project, the app works by turning a volunteer’s phone into a Snowflake proxy. Once enabled, it routes connections from people in high-censorship countries through the volunteer’s device and into the Tor Network, with traffic disguised to resemble a WebRTC video call rather than a Tor connection.
How the Snowflake Volunteer Android App Works
Snowflake sits within the Pluggable Transports family of circumvention technologies, which are designed to make Tor bridge traffic look like ordinary internet activity, adding an extra layer of obfuscation on top of standard Tor routing. According to the Tor Project’s Snowflake page, the broader volunteer network currently counts approximately 127,599 Snowflakes in total across all platforms, including browser extensions. The new Android app’s contribution sits alongside that base: by May, roughly a month after launch, the app was generating around 1,700 active daily proxy IP addresses, up from approximately 1,300 in April, a month-on-month rise of 29%. At its peak, the count exceeded 2,100. As Cybernews reported, even before the standalone app appeared, Snowflake had already accumulated roughly 146,000 active IP addresses each day contributing across all methods.
The Bloco team built the app on top of IPtProxy, a library developed by the Guardian Project that bundles together pluggable transport tools for mobile apps. According to the Tor Project blog, Bloco became curious whether a dedicated proxy-volunteering app could bring in more helpers after observing how much capacity the proxy feature added in existing apps; the studio approached Tor’s anti-censorship team, which had plans for a similar project but lacked the capacity to develop it.
What Volunteers Can Control
The app’s settings let volunteers decide exactly when and how their device is used. Connections can be limited to when the phone is charging, restricted to Wi-Fi to avoid mobile data charges, or capped at up to five simultaneous users. A background-running option keeps the app active even when it is not open on screen.
The dashboard displays in real time how many people are currently being helped, a daily connection count, and bytes sent and received. A statistics panel logs connections by date, so volunteers can see their cumulative contribution over time.
One feature absent from most privacy apps is a Panic Button. According to the GitHub repository, if a panic-button app such as Ripple is triggered, Snowflake Volunteer will delete all its data, reset user preferences, and hide itself, reappearing under the name “Plants.” Opening the Plants app restores the original name and icon. The app is licensed under GPL-3.0 and had 88 stars, 4 watchers, and 3 forks on GitHub at the time of writing.
The developers also address the question volunteers are most likely to ask: what if someone uses your proxy to visit illegal sites? Their answer is that the visible browsing IP address seen by any website will match the Tor exit node, ‘not yours (since you’re an entry point).’ Volunteers are entry points to the network, not exit points, so activity further down the chain does not trace back to their device.
Two practical caveats apply. Battery optimisation must be turned off for the app to function, which may be a problem on older handsets. And anyone on a capped home broadband plan should monitor usage, since active proxying does consume data.
Battery and Performance in Testing
ZDNET’s Charlie Osborne ran the app for three hours on a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 with five simultaneous connections permitted, starting at 88% battery. After one hour, the reading was 84%; after two hours, 81%; after three hours, 79%. A three-percentage-point drop per hour, under active proxying conditions and during a UK heatwave, suggests the battery impact is modest for most users.
The app carries a content rating of ‘Rated for 3+’ on Google Play, has exceeded 1,000 downloads, collects no data from users, and shares no data with third parties. An update on 10 August 2026 added Czech and Persian language support, bringing the total to eight languages.
For the app to be useful, the pool of volunteers needs to keep growing: the more proxies in the network, the harder it becomes for any government to block them all. With TechRadar and others now covering the launch, whether the daily proxy count can push meaningfully beyond the 2,100 peak reached during the app’s early weeks is the figure worth watching.