“Use Direct Connection” Always be 5%

[rrn21833]

“Use Direct Connection”As the default? It‘s not good.

[tladesignz]

Unfortunately, it's not just the default, it's the only option now.

Recent developments have forced us to remove all pluggable transports support from Orbot iOS. (The macOS version still has it!)

Why?

• Apple limits "Network Extensions" (the part of a "VPN" app, where the networking functionality is implemented) to 50 MB of RAM usage. If you use more accidentally, the extension is stopped immediately. This is a ridiculous limit, considering that all devices this app runs on have at least 3 GB (Gigabytes! compared to megabytes!) of RAM, but until now, we where unfortunately unsuccessful in negotiating a higher limit.

• Tor recently had an update, where they now allow more nodes in one "family". (Nodes are marked with a family to improve the routing algorithm: So it doesn't accidentally choose 3 nodes of the same family, hence keeping the onion routing inside one datacenter and one supplier of nodes.)

• Since then, nodes almost doubled, hence increasing the amount of data to process about the complete Tor network. (Every client tries to discover the complete network to avoid the need for an intermediary which would then make it easy to attack the network.)

• This increases RAM usage, hence driving Tor to use too much RAM inside the Network Extension and therefore crashing it.

• Too much memory usage of Tor alone leads to no room left for Pluggable Transports (aka. bridge type implementations).

• Since Pluggable Transports are all implemented in Go, and Go has a runtime which always runs, as soon as the Network Extension process is started, they had to be removed completely. Otherwise not enough RAM left...

=> To give users a minimal chance at all and not render this product utterly useless, the only option now is using Tor directly.

This sucks completely, but unfortunately there's no other way besides improving Tor.

And that won't happen, since Tor Project is now in the process of moving to their new implementation called "Arti" (A Rust Tor Implementation).
But Arti currently uses even more RAM than the original Tor written in C. And it will take many more moons until this eventually changes.

In other words: I'm deeply sorry.

You might want to look into Onion Browser, which contains its own Tor now again and doesn't have these problems, but, of course, is only a browser, not a full device traffic sink:

• http://github.com/onionBrowser/onionbrowser
• https://onionbrowser.com
• https://apps.apple.com/us/app/onion-browser/id519296448