These two articles from March 2020 claim to have insider knowledge about Tor developing the Tails OS for use on mobile smart phones, but where actually is this product now, is it available yet? If not when will it be released
3 Answers
Those articles are from 2014, not 2020. This is not under development, and as far as I know there are no plans for anything similar.
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the question was about Tails, but regarding Tor, is this official: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.torproject.torbrowser Jan 24, 2021 at 11:35
Well, there're three things to consider to realize why there is no such thing as Tails for mobile:
- First of all, Tails utilizes separation that is barely implemented on mobile OS'es. As a developer with 30 years of practice I was only available to make it on Android v6, iOS is a bloatware and closed, Windows Mobile is almost the same as iOS except the permissions to the code, not just an applications
- Mobile OS devs are earning their money on selling their users data OR not interfering to it to not to face an active actions from the original vendors - hello LineageOS ;)
- Tor developers themselves look like to not to incorporate the obvious improvements: I've sent my patches to them a decade ago - dead silence, I've published them on GitHub as a PoC - silence still...
We do need a more deep user-based awareness and not in the way like the Apple is trying to do it now. If you need more technical details with flat facts - just drop me a line.
And - about Tails OS - the Cubes OS is looking a way more decent even for a desktop
Smartphones based on ARM are not supported yet.
Tails is based on Debian, and the support of smartphone specific issues (like touch screens) is not mature enough and widely supported for now
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Debian is pretty useful for mobile and/or embedded devices - so it's totally not a blocker. The problem/blocker is an artificially-made API's that vendors are pushing: they're tuned up to trace an end-user– Alexey Vesnin ♦Jun 6, 2021 at 21:58
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Both ARM and smartphone specific issues (like touch screens) are refraining the Tails team to support smartphones. The answer you downvoted is actually correct. Jun 7, 2021 at 21:01
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Thank you. Still, the mobile device support of Debian is still partial and not mature enough for Tails (for example, the GPG Applet requires more work to be usable on touchscreens.). The ARM-related part is available there: tails.boum.org/support/faq/index.en.html#arm Jun 7, 2021 at 22:46
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I agree that the support is immature for the time I'm writing this, but actually - a smartphone vendors should make their step forward to help the process, IMHO...– Alexey Vesnin ♦Jun 10, 2021 at 1:40