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Comment by jqpabc123

4 months ago

Looks interesting but the lack of an iOS client makes it a non-starter for me. I use Android but I have friends and family who don't.

It's definitely one of the bigger challenges. Currently we don't see a viable way to deploy something like Cwtch on iOS (both in due to how locked down the platform is in general, and the requirement to run a backing onion service for each profile making mobile a hassle in the general case) - we are somewhat hopeful that advances on the Tor front might make it possible one day.

  • would something like Orbot work?

    https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orbot/id1609461599

    • Cwtch requires setting up onion services, and the app currently does that automatically via establishing a control connection with a Tor process (either launched by Cwtch, or provided by the system).

      Orbot can be configured to expose the same control port (or at least it could on Android when I last looked a few years back, I'm not sure about this capability on iOS), and Cwtch can be configured to use a custom control port connection - but that imposes much more work on the user, and is somewhat fragile.

      That could likely be made to work on iOS in some factor, but the problem of the stability of the services themselves would remain. Its definitely something we'd like to explore.