Preparing Tor Browser for Android for Mainstream Adoption

Tor Browser for Android (TBA) has approximately two million current
installations. It is the only mobile browsing option that comes with a
holistic solution to address online censorship and privacy protection at
both the browser and network levels. TBA meets an important need for
privacy when browsing on mobile devices. An important change is coming
to TBA’s underlying codebase. By September 2020, Mozilla will depreciate
Fennec, the version of mobile Firefox on which TBA is built. Fennec will
be replaced by Fenix. As a result, we must migrate Tor Browser for
Android from Fennec to Fenix, or TBA will no longer receive support or
security updates from Mozilla and it will become incredibly difficult
for the Tor Project to maintain long-term. Additionally, maintaining
Fennec beyond Mozilla’s support would be an obstacle to collaboration
and prevent us from integrating parts of Tor into the new Firefox mobile
browser.

The goal of this project is to complete a migration of TBA from Fennec
to Fenix. The short-term impact of this project is that TBA users
receive usability and performance benefits that come built-in with
Fenix. The long-term impact of this project is that TBA remains a
sustainable, safe option for mobile users in need of privacy and
censorship circumvention