Crake Roost

Run a real Tox relay and bootstrap node on a spare Android phone or tablet. Roost turns an unused device into a UDP DHT node, a TCP relay, and a bootstrap node for the Tox network, so more of the network's traffic has somewhere to pass through.

Part of the Crake privacy suite.

Why this exists

The Tox network leans on a thin pool of public relays and bootstrap nodes. A larger, more spread-out pool makes the network faster and harder to disrupt. Most people have an old phone in a drawer. Roost lets that phone add capacity to a decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging network instead of sitting idle.

The node holds no user secrets. It is not a messenger and cannot read anything that passes through it. Tox is end-to-end encrypted; a relay only forwards ciphertext.

What it does

• Bootstrap node so new clients can find the DHT
• UDP DHT node taking part in Tox's distributed hash table
• TCP relay so peers behind restrictive networks can still connect
• Automatic UPnP port mapping requests IGD port forwarding from local home routers
• Live telemetry dashboard monitors real-time uptime, inbound/outbound packets, and router mapping
• 24/7 Thermal safeguards monitors battery temperature and adapts iteration pacing if hot
• Runs as a foreground service with a wakelock, optionally starting on boot
• Generates and stores its own DHT keypair on the device (never cloud-backed)

Reachability, told straight

Roost never shows a green "working" light it has not earned. The status chip has three states:

• Amber, "Active · Awaiting inbound peers": the node is up and taking part in the DHT, but no peer has connected in yet
• Green, "Reachable · Inbound peers connected": at least one peer has actually reached the relay from outside, proven by the relay's received-packet count
• Amber, "Active · Reachability pending": the reachability metric is initializing or could not be measured

Green is earned, not assumed. Behind a home NAT with no port forwarding the chip stays amber, because that is the truth: the node runs, but the wider internet cannot reach it yet.

Running a relay: read this first

A relay's IP address is public by design. Anyone can see the address of a node that is relaying traffic.

• Do not run Roost on a home connection you care about. It publishes that connection's public IP as a relay address. For a family home, that means publishing your household's residential IP.
• The intended home for a public relay is a pseudonymous VPS or a connection you are comfortable publishing.
• Reachability needs an inbound path: a forwarded port or UPnP. A connection behind CGNAT cannot accept inbound connections and cannot host a reachable relay.

Limitations

• Port 443 does not bind on an unrooted Android device. Ports below 1024 are privileged, so Roost binds only high ports (for example 33445 and 3389). A phone relay adds capacity but cannot serve the 443 censorship-circumvention path that a VPS relay can.
• Native libraries target arm64-v8a (modern 64-bit phones), armeabi-v7a (older 32-bit devices), and x86_64 (emulators).
• minSdk 26, targetSdk 34.

Build

Open the project in Android Studio. It generates the Gradle wrapper and local.properties, then downloads the Android Gradle Plugin and Kotlin toolchain. Then Build > Build APK.

The prebuilt native libraries (libtoxnode.so, libsodium.so for both ABIs) are checked in under app/src/main/jniLibs/, so you can build the APK without running the native toolchain yourself. The C sources and JNI bridge live in native/.

How it is put together

• native/toxnode.c a compact node that calls the same toxcore functions the reference tox-bootstrapd daemon uses, configured by arguments rather than a config file
• native/toxnode_jni.c the JNI bridge (com.crake.roost.ToxNode)
• app/ the Kotlin app: foreground RelayService, MainActivity with the status chip and node key, boot receiver, and battery-optimization handling

Built on the reference c-toxcore library and libsodium.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 NoxToxCipher

Crake Roost is free software: you can redistribute it and modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version (GPL-3.0-or-later). See LICENSE for the full text.

It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for details.

This project links c-toxcore, which is also GPLv3, and libsodium, which is ISC licensed.