What is Orbot and how to use its VPN - The Android Soul

Posted: 23 Dec 2019 10:32 AM PST

Before smartphones, every time users wanted to browse through the internet securely, they relied on Tor Browser on their PC. Tor Browser, developed by The Tor Project, was the only way to browse the internet anonymously and defend against surveillance back in the day.

With so much stress on privacy and intent security lately, users gradually switched to VPN services to satisfy their browsing needs. But even VPNs got blocked. That is where Orbot comes in. The same team which was behind TOR also provides an app designed to work on Android to allow users to get online anonymously.

What is Orbot?

While Orbot sounds like the name of a game with robots, it's a much more useful tool. Aimed to deliver a private internet connection, Orbot is a proxy app that commands apps on Android to connect to the Internet more securely.

The app is integrated with TOR and thus helps traffic bounce across several systems around the globe to make sure you're safe. To understand this better, you'll need to know the difference between a VPN and a proxy.

What is VPN

A VPN service offers an encrypted connection through a tunnel between your device to its own servers around the world. VPNs can be used to hide your IP address, thus preventing your ISP and the government from knowing your physical location.

This also helps users bypass region-specific websites and services since you can now tweak your viewing location to be anywhere the VPN provider's servers are in. While it allows you to browse the internet securely, one major drawback of VPN is that the performance of your internet connection will drop significantly and internet speeds will be slower than usual.

What is a proxy?

While a VPN and proxy might look similar on the table, there are some significant differences. With a proxy service, when you request a website, the requests are routed through a proxy server in such a way that you're only interacting with the proxy server during the whole time.

A proxy will make it seem like you're connecting to a website from a location other than your physical address, thus hiding your public IP address. The difference here is that, unlike a VPN service, a proxy app can filter out the content you or others connected to your network don't want to view.

What makes Orbot stand out?

Till recently, proxy services lacked encryption as data packets between the user and target servers weren't encrypted. Orbot, unlike other proxies, uses TOR to encrypt all of the user's traffic by bouncing it through a slew of computers across the globe. In addition to that, Orbot also has a built-in VPN feature which the company says will help you bypass firewalls.

How is Orbot's VPN feature different from VPN apps?

Since it's powered by TOR, Orbot's VPN service cannot be blocked by websites and services like other VPNs are. This is because it will keep bouncing from system to system until a connection is established. Also, unlike other VPN apps, Orbot doesn't render any advertisements in its interface.

While standard VPN services are known to encrypt your data and then connect you to the target server, Orbot's VPN functionality first encrypts the data and then scatters this data through several systems across the world.

Why should you use Orbot

Defend against network surveillance: Orbot encrypts your Internet traffic and this data is sent through several systems before reaching the end server. The app thus ensures that your privacy and data remain protected from prying eyes, ISP and the government.
Open-source and Ad-free: Unlike traditional VPN apps that serve ads whenever the app is opened, Orbot is free of ads. This is because the service is open source and anyone is free to check out the codes of the software.
Root access allows using proxy across all Android apps and services: Users can proxy all of their outgoing traffic from their Android device through Orbot if they have access to root. You can also manage which apps you want to use with Orbot.

How to use Orbot on Android

Using Orbot on Android is pretty easy but you need to first set it up. While you can use the app to change the proxy server, you can also apply the proxy via VPN to use it on all apps. We've prepared a guide to get you started with Orbot.

How to set up Orbot

Download and install Orbot from Google Play.
Open Orbot.
Follow the on-screen instructions.
- On the welcome screen, click the arrow on the bottom right.
- When reaching the last page, press on Done.
- You will now be greeted by the app's main page.
Tap on the huge grayed-out Onion icon at the center that reads Start.
- This will start the proxy process inside Orbot with the app's default settings.
- Tapping on the icon will turn it into yellow, which indicates that Orbot is processing your connection with a proxy.
- This icon turns green when Orbot has successfully connected to a proxy server.

You're now ready to use Orbot. Orbot will be visible as a widget in the notifications drawer.

How to make Orbot work on Samsung Galaxy devices

On Samsung devices, it was found that there was an app that listens to the same network port that Orbot needs. To avoid that from happening you have to follow the guide from down below:

Download and install Netstat Plus from Google Play.
Open Netstat Plus.
Head over to the Listen tab at the top.
Look for the app which is using the network port 9050.
- Remember the name of the app.
Now find the listening app on your Android phone and force stop it. To do that:
1. Open Settings.
2. Scroll down to select Applications.
3. Tap on the app that was listening on the network port 9050.
4. Hit Force Stop.
5. Tap on Disable.
If that doesn't solve the problem, you can change the Tor SOCKS network to 9051.
1. Open the Orbot app.
2. Click on the 3-dot menu at the top right.
3. Tap Settings.
4. Under the Debug section, change Tor SOCKS to 9051 or AUTO.

There you go, Orbot should work on your Samsung Galaxy device.

How to switch on Orbot's VPN Mode

While switching on Orbot in its default setting allows you to browse the web anonymously, its VPN Mode makes sure the proxy method works across all the apps installed on your device. Orbot's VPN Mode uses Android's built-in VPN tool and instead of an actual VPN service, it sets up TOR as a VPN. This allows any app on your phone to use Orbot's proxy service.

Open the Orbot app.
Tap on the onion icon at the center. Wait till the connection is established and the icon turns green.
Tap on the toggle next to the VPN mode section below the onion icon.

Orbot's VPN Mode will now be turned on and you can use the proxy server across all the apps installed on your device.

How to select individual apps to use Orbot's VPN Mode

While switching on Orbot's VPN Mode through the main screen will enable the proxy server for the entire device, you can also manually select which of the apps on your device can use the feature. Selecting the VPN mode for individual apps will make sure that Orbot connects to a proxy server only when using the select apps.

Open the Orbot app.
Tap on the onion icon at the center. Wait till the connection is established and the icon turns green.
Click on the gear icon at the bottom, under the Tor-enabled apps section.
- Orbot will now show you a list of apps that require connection to the internet.
Select the apps that you need to work with Orbot's VPN Mode.
Go back to the previous screen.
Tap on the toggle next to the VPN mode section.

Orbot's VPN functionality will now be applied to the selected apps on your Android device. It's important to note that switching on the VPN mode will only enable VPN for these apps and not all of them. To disable this, you will have to unselect the apps that you selected in the method above.

How to change your location on Orbot

Similar to other VPN apps, Orbot offers a way to alter your location and access geographically restricted content on some services. Detailed information on the full routing process is shown under the Onion icon.

Open the Orbot app.
Tap on the drop-down menu which by default reads Global (Auto).
Select your preferred region from the options listed in the drop-down menu.
Tap on the onion icon at the center. Wait till the connection is established and the icon turns green.
You can also enable the preferred region across all apps or selected apps by tapping the toggle next to the VPN mode section.

Posted: 27 Dec 2019 05:25 AM PST

The year is winding down and that means it's time to round up the best new Android apps of 2019. There were a ton of app launches this year. In fact, we narrowed down this list from a prospective list of over 120 total apps launched anywhere from the last week of December last year through December 15th this year.

2019 was an excellent year for apps. We saw some outstanding releases across a multitude of categories. In fact, this year's list is one of the most varied we've ever put together for a year-end app list. That said, there are three new browsers this year and that's more than we've seen in previous years. There are no duds on this one and everything here has seen success. Here are the best Android apps from 2019. Please note, these apps all launched in 2019 and we didn't include any re-brands such as LiveXLive or re-releases like Newton Mail. None of these apps existed in 2018 or if they did, it's because they were in limited access betas.

Abstruct

Price: Free / $1.99

Abstruct is one of my decent wallpaper apps from 2019. This one is by Hampus Olsson, the official wallpaper artist of OnePlus. The app includes a decent array of abstract style wallpapers and every one of them are at 4K resolution. It also has every OnePlus wallpaper from the OnePlus 2 through the OnePlus 7 along with Paranoid Android wallpapers as well. The backgrounds are vibrant, colorful, and there are even some for AMOLED fans who like predominately black wallpapers. Vectorify de Home and Artwalls were two other excellent wallpaper apps from 2019, but we think people liked Abstruct the most.

Adobe Premiere Rush

Price: Free / $9.99-$52.99 per month

Adobe Premiere Rush was Adobe's big release for 2019. It's a video editor and it seems to be the one Adobe plans on improving for the foreseeable future. The app boasts a near-professional experience with full video and audio support along with a multi-track timeline, various templates for things, and even some niche tools. It doesn't have everything the desktop version of Premiere Pro has, but we expect the feature set to expand over time and for Adobe to fix most of the bugs. This has a very good shot at being a near-desktop class editor someday. We just hope it's sooner rather than later.

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Apex Weather

Price: Free with in-app purchases

Apex Weather is a clean and good looking weather app. It covers all of the basics, including current weather, a weather radar, a 7-day forecast, severe weather alerts, and you can track multiple cities at once. You also get some niceties like weather news and daily weather briefs in your notifications. The app actually has a large selection of weather widgets that you download as add-ons. It also works with a Windy.com radar that it encourages you to download so prepare yourself for that. In any case, this is the strongest showing in weather this year, although Appy Weather is also a decent 2019 weather app for fans of minimalism.

Calendar Widget by Home Agenda

Price: $1.99

Calendar Widget by Home Agenda is an excellent calendar widget option and one that was surprisingly popular among our readers. The app has an exhaustive laundry list of features including themes, various widget layouts, the ability to show older events, a weather function, the ability to group events together, and various other customization options. Both the app and widget are super clean and should work on most types of home screen layouts. It also works in over half a dozen languages. Calendar Notify was another such app from 2019 that we thought was pretty good too.

This is Calendar Widget, one of the best android widgets

John NESS and John GBAC

Price: Free / $4.49 each

John NESS and John GBAC launched in early 2019 and immediately became two of the best console emulators on the Play Store. The developer, John emulators, already had successful emulators for the Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and a few others. However, John NESS and John GBAC combines all of those efforts into two simple apps. John NESS covers the SNES and NES while John GBAC covers Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. Both apps comes with cloud storage support, fast forward and slow down modes, save states, turbo buttons, customizable layouts, hardware controller support, and excellent compatibility. They are a tad pricey, but with both apps you get class leading emulation of four total consoles. We think it's worth it.

John NESS is one of the best SNES emulators for android

Live Transcribe and Sound Amplifier by Google

Price: Free

Live Transcribe and Sound Amplifier are two new accessibility apps from Google. Sound Amplifier is rather simple. It boosts the sounds from the phone in order to help those who are hard of hearing. Live Transcribe is arguably the more exciting app of the two. It lets a deaf individual transcribe whatever someone is saying in real time as they talk. Both apps are available in the Play Store and come baked into Android 10 natively as well. Google paid attention to accessibility in 2019 and it showed with these two apps. Live Transcribe is available at the button below and Sound Amplifier is downloadable here. Lookout is an app that uses a camera to see things and then tell blind people what it sees. You can find that one here.

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Mint Browser

Price: Free

Mint Browser is a surprisingly good mobile browser. It hits all of the basics, including an incognito mode, bookmarks, a night mode, and low storage requirements. However, it also adds some of the better extras, including ad-blocking, the ability to download videos from various websites, and a data saver mode. The data saver mode basically just blocks ads and restricts image loads in articles but that still helps more than most browsers for those with slow or tiered data plans. It keeps things simple and small so don't expect Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox levels of power here. It's a serviceable mobile browser with just the right selection of features.

Mint Browser 2019 screenshot best android apps 2019

MiXplorer Silver

Price: $4.99

MiXplorer Silver is a seriously powerful file explorer app. It can handle almost anything you can throw at it, including music, video, images, and more. The app supports over a dozen archive file types, can link to cloud storage accounts from 19 providers, and it even includes ebook file support via EPUB, MobiPacket, and native PDF support. You also get a VLC codecs add-on so you can view basically any video or music file on the planet. The price is a bit steep and this is easily overkill for most people, but it's definitely among the best Android apps of 2019.

MiXplorer - best file manager apps for android

MyScript Calculator 2

Price: $2.99

MyScript Calculator 2 is one neat calculator. It's the successor to the original MyScript Calculator and it adorned our best math apps list for a long time. The second iteration works similarly to the first. You open the app, write down an equation, and the app solves it for you. It works with basic operators such as addition and subtraction along with powers, roots, exponents, and some basic trigonometry, logarithms, and it can even recognize constants. This is an excellent calculator for middle and high school students and some lower level college math as well. It runs for a flat $2.99 with no additional in-app purchases or ads. Microsoft did something similar to Photomath in December 2019 with a ton of potential as well.

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Spark Mail

Price: Free

Spark Mail had a fortuitous start. It launched the same week Google took down Inbox by Gmail and has many of the same features. It does the email basics so we'll skip passed those. The app also allows you to snooze email, schedule emails to send later, an AI function to sort your mailbox, and you can set reminders just like Inbox by Gmail. Some other features include pinning emails, undo sent mail, and a reasonably decent mailbox search. It also works for most popular email clients so it's a good change from something like Gmail or Outlook.

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Steam Link and Xbox Game Streaming

Price: Free

Google Stadia launched this year and its major competitors aren't giving Google any quarter. Steam officially launched its Steam Link app this year and Microsoft launched a beta of Xbox Game Streaming. Both apps do more or less the same thing. You can play your PC games (Steam Link) or Xbox games (Xbox Game Streaming) on your device. Unlike Stadia, these services use your existing hardware to play the game and your local area network to shoot it over to your mobile phone. Of course, you need the hardware in order to make it work and that's the biggest con for these over Google Stadia. Both of them still need work, but performed admirably in testing and could be excellent alternatives to Stadia. Steam Link is linked at the button below and you can pick up Xbox Game Streaming here.

Xbox Game Streaming screenshot for the best new android apps list

Tor Browser

Price: Free

Tor Browser received an official launch in 2019 and automatically became the most private browser in the Play Store. It uses Tor's volunteer network to encrypt and hide your footprint from basically everybody. The browser also blocks trackers, helps you avoid surveillance, and features not one, but three layers of encryption. Those who value privacy above all else have virtually no other options unless they use a VPN. Of course, it's a new app and still needs a bit of work, but it seems to have overcome most of its early issues.

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Vivaldi Browser

Price: Free

Vivaldi Browser is one that swings at the bigger names in mobile browsing. The developers are previous employees of Opera Browser so this isn't their first rodeo. The app has a desktop variant and you can cross-sync between mobile and desktop just like the big dogs. Additionally, the app includes a built-in note taking function, the ability to screenshot entire webpages, multiple search engines, a dark mode, an ingognito mode, and more. Both the desktop and mobile versions use Chromium as a base and build on top. This is not a lightweight browser, it's a full-featured browser.

Vivaldi Browser Beta is one of the best new android apps

All those punch hole camera apps for Samsung phones

Price: Free / Varies

Samsung inspired a fairly significant number of app releases in 2019 with its punch hole camera. Unlike the notch, which is universally panned, people actually seem to like the punch hole cameras on 2019 Samsung flagships. In fact, they like them so much that there is a mini app ecosystem specifically for them. The app list includes Hidey Hole (linked at the button), Energy Ring, WallPix, Punch Hole Wallpapers, Notification Light, and many others. The punch hole impact is likely temporary as more OEMs develop under-display cameras, but in 2019 we talked about another one of these punch hole apps every other week for a few months and it was fun.

A screenshot of Hidey Hole for the best new android apps March 2019 edition

2019 app of the year: Disney+

Price: Free / $6.99-$12.99 per month / $69.99 per year

There are times where it's a better idea to bow to popular opinion and this is one of those times. Disney+ easily made the largest impact of any app in 2019 and it's not close. The service had tons of interest basically all year until it was announced and then immediately gave us Baby Yoda and a billion tweets from people re-watching the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Plus, the ad-free Hulu, ESPN+, and Disney+ bundle linked here is one of the best deals in the history of streaming. The Disney+ app is a bit clunky, but it'll definitely improve over time. It hit ten million subscribers in less than a week. Only Pokemon Go and Apple Music has incited that kind of excitement in the mobile app and game space over the last half a decade.

Disney Plus screenshot for the best new android apps

Honorable Mentions

Of course, there were way more than 15 good apps this year and, thus, we thought an honorable mentions section was a good idea. These apps are all still really good, but they just didn't squeeze into the top 15 along with the other apps we linked up there. These apps deserve an honorable mention.

1Gallery – This is a gallery app with a gallery vault option. It boasts encryption, support for power user image types like RAW, and subtitles for video. It uses encryption to hide all of the files from other people. It's not bad as far as gallery vault apps go.
Appy Weather – A minimal weather app with more than enough features for basic use, but not a ton of extra, useless fluff. It explains the forecast in plain English for easy comprehension.
Checketry – Download managers are a super niche market, but the Checketry was the best one of 2019. It features cross-platform support, support for Steam, and support for both Firefox and Chrome.
DoodleLens – An AR app that lets you doodle things and place them in real photos. It's not overly productive, but it's kid-friendly, fun, and it's a good example of AR technology in use.
Firefox ScreenshotGo Beta – This app only didn't crack the top 15 because it is still in beta. There is no better app for managing your screenshots than this one and it's not even at a stable release stage yet.
Memoria Photo Gallery – Memoria is a beautiful gallery app with a lot of neat features. It's success is hampered by some bugs that we hope the developer fixes. If they do, this is going to be among the best third party gallery apps on mobile.
Montessori Preschool – This is an educational app for kids. It covers math, logic, shapes, colors, arts, and a bunch of other subjects. It aims at children aged 3 through 7.
My Board Game Collection – A super niche, but surprisingly polished app for cataloging your board game collection. It launched during December 2018 just a bit too late for the 2018 list.
Post-It – We found it amusing that Post-It made a note taking app. The app uses graphics that look like actual Post-It notes. Plus, it's actually a decent note taking app. It needs a bit of work, but it's coming along nicely and competes in the note taking market.
Remote Fingerprint Unlock – This one is a power user app for security. It lets you use the fingerprint reader on your phone to unlock your PC. The setup is a bit complicated and it only works for Windows right now, but it actually works really well.
Ruff – Another note taking app with some decent functionality and excellent design. It won Google Play's Material Design award for theming and we agree. It's an excellent, if somewhat basic, note taking app.
Sphaera – Sphaera is a unique 4K wallpaper app. It uses screenshots of a map and stylizes it to your tastes. You can search for any location and use it as needed. The wallpapers are crisp and there is live wallpaper support.
Spotify Stations – This is an offshoot of Spotify. It works a lot like old Pandora where you pick a station and just listen to what it gives you. It's an experimental app and it may not be around forever, so we thought it was better as an honorable mention.
Threads from Instagram – Threads from Instagram is an offshoot of Instagram. It aims to be a more personal version of it for just your close friends and family. It's a neat premise but it needs more work.
Volume Control Panel Pro – This app intercepts your volume keys and uses different volume control. The new menu shows all of your various volumes every time you press the button. It works well and fixes some annoyances with the stock volume controls.