Help: let's compile Arti (Tor) ourselves

[callebtc]

Google Play forces us to use 16 kB page size:

16 KB Google Play compatibility requirement
Starting November 1st, 2025, all new apps and updates to existing apps submitted to Google Play and targeting Android 15+ devices must support 16 KB page sizes on 64-bit devices.

Our arti binaries are not compatible and also not really up to date. They also don't support all features we might need (like starting a Tor onion service for p2p data transfer).

If someone has experience with this, it would be cool to set up a build pipeline to compile Arti for android from the latest source release ourselves and use it in bitchat.

If you know how, please help!

[moehamade]

I'll work on this one along #508
Update: I managed to clone and compile the rust library into an AAR, and included the custom library in the bitchat android project, I'll keep trying to finalize errors and stuff.

[moehamade]

Here is what I was able to accomplish so far with relation to #508

I git cloned the rust project and compiled source code and generated .so files that I placed in the Android Project and proceeded to create a Java Native Interface (JNI).

Build	Size	vs Original (v1.2.1)	Guardian Project	Custom Arti
Original v1.2.1	3.6 MB	baseline	❌ No Tor	❌ No Tor
v1.3.1 (Guardian)	142 MB	+38x (🔴 39x larger)	✅ Yes (~138MB)	❌
Standard flavor	4.4 MB	+0.8 MB (✅ +22%)	❌ No Tor	❌ No Tor
Tor flavor (custom)	15 MB	+11.4 MB (⚠️ 3.4x larger)	❌	✅ Yes (~11MB)

Tor overhead from 140 MB → 11 MB (90% reduction)!

Channel	Recommendation
F-Droid	Publish BOTH flavors (users choose)
GitHub Releases	Two downloads: bitchat-standard-v1.6.0.apk (4.4MB) + bitchat-tor-v1.6.0.apk (15MB)
Bluetooth/Mesh	Share standard by default (3x faster)
Play Store	Could do standard + dynamic feature (Phase 2) OR just Tor flavor

4.4 MB vs 15 MB is still a 3.4x difference, If I manage to reduce the size even more, then flavoring can be skipped for this case, else we can keep it. I think it brings more value especially if we later label it as Lite and Full app with different sizes.

I'm just fixing bugs related to the wrapper, such as turning Tor off and On is still not working. And the wrapper might need maintenance.