Hello everyone.
In January of last year we announced that Chute was coming to Android — a preview under the working name MonoProxy for Android, with a promise of a public release “in the coming months”. It took longer than months. Today we keep the promise: Chute for Android is available now.
The Road Here
The 2025 announcement was really an engine story: our proxy stack, rewritten in Kotlin, passing 895 tests. An engine, however, is not an app. At the end of April this year the project moved into its own codebase, and the 225 commits since then are what turned it into one.
The shape of that work, roughly in order: spring brought the license and purchase plumbing, the first runtime dashboard, and QR-code and Wi-Fi imports. Early summer was the configuration editor, rebuilt section by section until every part of a Chute configuration — from WireGuard peers to header rewrites to mock responses — had a real editing form instead of a text area. July was parity month: the rule editor grew the AND/OR/NOT compound editor, configurations gained syntax highlighting and live validation, subscriptions became browseable-but-read-only, the interactive setup wizard came over from iOS, and four more languages joined the initial set. August added the parts you only build for Android — Tasker and Locale automation, launcher shortcuts, GeoIP sources you can host yourself — and the two distribution channels described below. September was mostly fixes, which is what software looks like right before it ships.
One mid-year change deserves its own sentence: we replaced the app’s packet-engine runtime with the same native TUN architecture the Chute engine uses elsewhere. One code path, no fallback mode, automatic restart if the engine ever dies — and an explicit error instead of a silent pretend-connection if it cannot start.
Today over seven hundred automated tests run against the app’s own code across its two builds, on top of the engine suite that never stopped growing.
One Chute, Everywhere
The working name is gone because the result is no longer a side build: it is Chute. The same configuration file you already run on Chute Mac or Chute iOS runs here — same rule syntax, same DNS features, same protocol support, same behaviour. Move between an iPhone, a Mac and an Android tablet and your proxy setup moves with you.
Two Ways to Install — and Why Two
Chute for Android ships through two channels:
- Google Play — the main channel. In-app purchase, automatic background updates, the store’s trust backing.
- The chute.life download page — a direct APK, carrying its own update check.
Two channels exist because one would leave people out. A rules-based proxy client finds its most natural audience in the same places where Google Play often is not — and a VPN app that cannot be reviewed, or can be removed, through a single account is a fragile thing to bet an entire platform on. So both, deliberately interchangeable: they share the same package name, version numbering and signing key, which means installing the Play version over the website APK — or the reverse — is an ordinary in-place upgrade. Your configurations and your license stay exactly where they were.
The direct APK’s update check stays in its lane: it checks at most once a day in the background (or when you tap Check for Updates on the About page), compares version numbers with our download service over pinned HTTPS, and hands the download URL to your browser. The app never downloads or installs anything behind your back.
Payment follows the channel. The Play build uses Google Play billing; the website build activates with your Chute license e-mail and key — the same mechanism Chute Mac has used for years. An existing Chute license restores on either build.
Free, and Pro
The free tier is a complete product: one local configuration, the full configuration editor, the VPN tunnel, per-app routing, the runtime dashboards and the diagnostics. None of it is time-limited.
A single one-time purchase unlocks Chute Pro, permanently:
- Keep more than one local configuration — and add new ones through any channel without replacing your current one
- Switch configurations while the tunnel is running, and copy a configuration to build a variant
- Control the local HTTP and SOCKS5 proxy server
- HTTPS inspection and the traffic recorder, for debugging your own traffic
One purchase, no subscription; your license travels with you across channels and platforms.
Privacy, Briefly
No advertising SDKs, period. Configurations, logs and session history live in the app’s private storage, are excluded from system backup, and leave the device only when you export a diagnostics bundle yourself. Communication with our license service runs over HTTPS with certificate pinning. Chute does not log, inspect or retain the contents of your tunneled traffic.
What Is Inside
The full tour gets its own post next week. The short version: a structured editor for every section of the configuration, with live validation against the engine’s own parser; 30 match-rule types plus logical combinations; rule, direct and global outbound modes; per-app routing; a live dashboard showing every connection, the policy it took and the rule that matched; DNS views down to the runtime cache; network and proxy diagnostics; and a guided setup wizard with an in-app manual if any of that is new territory.
Protocol support matches the rest of the Chute family — Shadowsocks (legacy and 2022), ShadowsocksR, VMess, VLESS, Trojan, Hysteria2, TUIC, AnyTLS, ShadowTLS, WireGuard, AmneziaWG, MASQUE, Tailscale, SSH, SOCKS5 and HTTP/HTTPS — because the engine underneath is the same KLNEKit you already run, with twenty-one months of updates built in.
Chute for Android runs on Android 11 and later, and speaks eight interface languages.
Get it on chute.life or on Google Play. Questions and bug reports: support@chute.life.
Thanks.
Chute Devs