[tor-dev] Fwd: Orbot roadmap feedback

[Nathan Freitas]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016, at 10:48 AM, Georg Koppen wrote:
> Nathan Freitas:
> > - Overall improved configuration / settings UI to make tuning Orbot a
> > better, simpler experience... this is an expansion of the new exit
> > country selector in Orbot v15.1, but also includes managing things like
> > network usage and so on.
> 
> Could you explain that point a bit more, what you currently have and
> what you plan to do? Especially the exit country selector seems kind of
> scary to me but maybe I am just missing some bits. I looked at the
> changelog you sent to tor-talk (in the alpha 1 release mail) but did not
> find anything related.

The broader idea is to determine which Tor torrc settings are relevant
to the mobile environment, and that could use a more intuitive user
interface than the empty text input we currently offer in our Settings
panel. This may also mean implement a slider type interface mechanism
similar to Tor Browser. In addition, users are interested in being able
to control which network types (wifi vs 3g) Orbot runs on, in order to
conserve spending on bandwidth.

The Exit country selector option (basically a list of countries that
starts with "World" as the option) is definitely controversial, but it
is also something that comes up over and over again as a feature
request. It is expected especially of a VPN-style app, which Orbot now
is. It may be we only enable it when the VPN feature is enabled, and
disable it when Tor is used directly via SOCKS from the Orfox browser.
We may also need to just sufficiently warn and inform the user so they
can decide for themselves what to do.

+n