Proton needs to add a feature to route its services directly to its onion service in the apps (mobile/desktop). This isn’t a new feature by any metric and it’s actually quite underrated among other privacy oriented apps.

It shouldn’t have to be explained, but Tor itself is a superior circumvention tool to online censorship worldwide. Proton already offers its own onion services on web for people who NEED it. The only caveat is this purpose is strictly limited to the browser and not where it could be an option within the apps to route directly to an onion site for extra security (since privacy is guaranteed over the Tor network connected to an onion service).

Many of the current circumvention tools and tactics from Proton are helpful but they aren’t foolproof. Alternative routing breaks apart if an admin on the network catches the proton domain calling to google/quad9/cloudflare/aws since it’s bundled there in the DNS queries. The next logical step is to go with Proton VPN. Duh, right? If Proton VPN can be blocked on a network, not even Stealth can help. Stealth is very hit or miss, and Proton is reluctant to try anything other VPNs successfully implemented to bypass VPN restrictions. Instead of really considering it, they wrote a blog post to talk down on it: https://protonvpn.com/support/socks5

So if everything is blocked on an aggressive network, what can you really do? Connect to Tor. It’s one of the best tools widely available to everyone and often the one that people could count their lives on. You could go ahead and say you can connect to Proton now without onion routing and just have Tor enabled, and you’re right that you can. You just gotta consider that it doesn’t carry the same benefits you get from a proper onion service. The kind that seems minimal but really could save a life. If you don’t care to believe it from here, you could read Proton’s own advocation for it themselves off their own blog post: https://proton.me/tor

This is a long writeup because I believe this HAS to be implemented and can’t be overlooked. A lot of posts here are people misunderstanding Proton and just posting grievances about bugs they found. I wrote this in hopes to get more attention to the matter.

I’m gonna link another post on the same topic someone else posted because if not this post gains traction, this one should at least gather some attention: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/945460-general-ideas/suggestions/48578795-proton-apps-exclusively-only-via-tor