[tor-talk] Not able to download Tor to droid

[Nathan Freitas]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2016, at 05:03 PM, Nathaniel Suchy wrote:
> If you stop Tor (Orbot) and then start it again the issue should be
> fixed.
> On a side note why isn't Tor built into Orfox on Android? 

We chose not to do this, because you can use Orbot standalone for many
other apps. You don't want every app on your phone that wants to use Tor
to have to run their own instance, as it would eat up battery and
network. We are seeing more and more apps, like Facebook, DuckDuckGo,
OpenKeychain, Conversations, ChatSecure, etc support proxying through
Tor with Orbot.

In addition, Android provides a very good inter-app
communication/coordination mechanism through intents and remote
services, that isn't really possible in a cross-platform way on
desktops. 

On iPhone there
> is an open source project OnionBrowser where the Tor Binary is built in.
> I am curious why the Orbot/Orfox team hasn't done the same.

Onion Browser has to build in Tor because iOS doesn't allow for
background services generally.

+n