Release of open source Android anti-censorship library

2 points by greatfire ↗ HN
We are very excited to share with you the release of Envoy - our open source C and Java Library derived from Chromium Cronet which can be used to make Android apps resistant to censorship. We have uploaded the library to our GitHub page:

https://github.com/greatfire/envoy

This library can be integrated into existing Android apps. Android is by far the most popular mobile operating system in China. Even though Google Play is blocked in China, there are many other ways to get Android apps onto your phone. We hope that this library is used by a wide variety of developers, but in particular we hope that larger organizations, whose websites are blocked in China, consider incorporating this library into their exisiting apps.

We have created demo versions of how this code can be integrated into existing apps, so that you can see the library in action and can see that it works. Demo versions have been created for Wikipedia (“the world’s largest source of information”) and DuckDuckGo, the world’s leading privacy-based search engine.

All of the world's largest internet companies, from Facebook, to Google, to Twitter, could theoretically incporate this code into their existing Android apps and be able to reach their audiences in China free of censorship controls.

If you are a developer, we hope that you and your peers can take the time to try out the code. If you know of someone who might find this code useful, please do direct them to this post. We stand ready to answer any questions which you may have and to provide assistance in any way we can.

2 comments

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I'm a fan of GreatFire Analyzer, so I'm intrigued. But it's not clear to me what this library actually does. What kinds of censorship can it defeat? DNS poisoning, deep packet inspection, IP-based blocks? Do you direct traffic through your own servers or do you sneak past the Great Firewall in some other way? So many questions. All of that information should probably be somewhere in the readme.
Excellent, thank you. This means a lot to me.