Snowflake Volunteer, an Android app to help people bypass censorship

Bypassing censorship comes down to two challenges: disguising internet traffic from censors while making an open network easy to reach. . During the first half of 2026, the Snowflake broker saw an average of approximately 146,000 unique volunteer proxy IP addresses checking in each day^{, an Android app studio in Portugal became curious if a standalone app, focused just on volunteering proxies, could reach even more helpers. They reached out to Tor's anti-censorship team which had plans to work on a similar project, but had not yet had the capacity to develop it, yet. So, Bloco took on the task of building such an app.}

The motivation grew out of the team's work with for the mobile Tor ecosystem, including and . Helping people bypass internet censorship .

We also would like to thank our community of localizers. Thanks to their efforts, the app is already available in 8 languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish and Vietnamese). If you want to expand access to Snowflake Volunteer, consider contributing translations into more languages. Localization is how we reach this global community. Learn .