Orbot disables wifi/won't connect (iOS) about onionbrowser HOT 12 CLOSED

We were forced to move away from UIWebView to the newer renderer WKWebView. And that does support proxying through a local Tor only from iOS 17 onwards.

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Pretty much same as above, except Orbot disconnects my wifi then attempts to connect over mobile data and fails between 10/30% during which time the device is disconnected from basically all networks. Very frustrating

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Sorry, folks.

It seems, this is a problem Apple introduced with iOS 16.5.

See guardianproject/orbot-apple#67 for the central node to all discussions.

As per all my researches, it looks like the "VPN" process doesn't get killed, but iOS thinks it was. This breaks restarting. It looks like the old process gets killed after about 1 minute. Then it should work again.
What also seems to help is to clear the cache, maybe because this triggers an earlier kill of that zombie process. (In Orbot -> Settings -> Clear Tor Cache, at the very bottom.)

The short WiFi-on/off behaviour is to be expected. I don't think the device really does stop the WiFi connection. After the "VPN" is established, my devices show WiFi connection again. I guess, this behaviour is due to the captive portal tester for WiFi connections. Even though you're already connected to a WiFi, iOS won't say so, until it can reach a certain Apple website. It does this to test, if it gets redirected. If so, iOS will show you a dialog containing the captive portal of the WiFi hotspot, where you can check the "I have read the terms and agree" flag.

from onionbrowser.

Thank you!
Should I give it another try, or is the issue on-going?

from onionbrowser.

Thank you!
Should I give it another try, or is the issue on-going?

I released a fix. It will automatically retry, if the OS stopped the VPN again to remedy some strange behaviour of iOS 16.5. It also contains a "Clear Tor Cache" button right on the main scene, so you can try that quickly. Should work better now, but "your milage may vary"...

from onionbrowser.

Having a lot of disconnections on iOS 16.6 - Onion Browser totally unusable and Orbot just seems to die after connecting.

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Having a lot of disconnections on iOS 16.6 - Onion Browser totally unusable and Orbot just seems to die after connecting.

Sorry to hear. Orbot update is on the way! Unfortunately, we suddenly have a lot of issues since iOS 16.5 which very much looks like Apple is the cause for. I'll try to work it out with them, but it's difficult.

I have also speculations that the behaviour/the traffic of the Tor network changed so much in recent months, that it makes the client consume too much memory for a Network Extension (which Apple limits to a pretty low 50 MB) so I'm also working with Tor to improve the clients behaviour there.

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I worked fine in a regular OnionBrowser app without Orbot, why is it a required thing now? It's literally impossible to connect now because outer VPN gets disabled and local ISP blocks all request no matter what bridges are used

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#47
#231

Sorry, @xahon, unfortunately, Apple makes your use case impossible.

from onionbrowser.

Haven't been solved unfortunately

from onionbrowser.

Haven't been solved unfortunately

Yes, and it won't be solved, soon. Sorry. We're cornered here and we need to wait until some major development happens at Tor Project. Use iOS 17 and the built-in Tor the latest Onion Browser now is able to provide again. That doesn't have the resource constraints. (But is less secure. 🤷)

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@tladesignz Did Apple do some major changes in the same OS version (15) so that Onion Browser stopped working the same way as it did before? I don't think they could break something that hard in a minor update. My old iPhone doesn't even update to 16 version, let alone version 17

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