Interesting writing from Simplex about the trade offs of Tor. https://simplex.chat/blog/20240604-simplex-chat-v5.8-private-message-routing-chat-themes.html
We believe that Tor may be the wrong solution for some users for one of the reasons:
much higher latency, error rate and resource usage.
people who want to use Tor are better served by specialized apps, such as Orbot.
Tor usage is restricted in some networks, so it would require complex configuration in the app UI.
some countries have legislative restrictions on Tor usage, so embedding Tor would require supporting multiple app versions, and it would leave the original problem unsolved in these countries.
Also, while Tor solves the problem of IP address protection, it doesn't solve the problem of meta-data correlation by user's transport session. When the client connects to the messaging relays via Tor, the relays can still observe which messaging queues a user sends messages to via a single TCP connection. The client can mitigate it with per-contact transport isolation, but it uses too much traffic and battery for most users.
We believe that Tor may be the wrong solution for some users for one of the reasons:
much higher latency, error rate and resource usage.
people who want to use Tor are better served by specialized apps, such as Orbot.
Tor usage is restricted in some networks, so it would require complex configuration in the app UI.
some countries have legislative restrictions on Tor usage, so embedding Tor would require supporting multiple app versions, and it would leave the original problem unsolved in these countries.
Also, while Tor solves the problem of IP address protection, it doesn't solve the problem of meta-data correlation by user's transport session. When the client connects to the messaging relays via Tor, the relays can still observe which messaging queues a user sends messages to via a single TCP connection. The client can mitigate it with per-contact transport isolation, but it uses too much traffic and battery for most users.