Using Proxies

DummyDroid allows you to optionally route traffic through other network nodes (“proxies”). You may want or have to use a proxy in order to:

• hide your real IP address from Google.
• download region locked apps.
• get through a (corporate) firewall.

Whatever your reason, you’ll have to provide your proxy preferences as an url in the following format:

scheme://host:port

The scheme may either be socks, http or https. Here are some examples:

• http://proxy.example.com:8080
• https://proxy.example.com:3128
• socks://localhost:2222

Note that the scheme only determines how you connect to a proxy. The traffic routed through it is always encrypted.

Using DummyDroid to bypass geo blocking

Once DummyDroid gives you the download URL for an app (you can actually copy&paste that into a web browser), that app gets bound to your account. Meaning, you can download it from anywhere in the world afterwards without having to use a proxy again!

The rationale behind this is that a local business, let’s say, a public transport service might publish a bus schedule app. Obviously, that’s only of use to locals and the company probably doesn’t want to get poor reviews from foreigners. However, if you happen to be in town and were able to download the app, then you should probably receive (security) updates as well.

In practical terms this means that you can simply unlock an app with DummyDroid and then download it with Raccoon without having to configure another profile.

Public proxies vs. paid proxy services

Open proxies are often swamped with traffic and short lived. so you may consider paying for proxy services — DON’T. Paid proxy services are often run by technically inept business people. They understand “proxy server” in the naive sense:

1. Buy an IP address range that was registered to a defunct company in the desired country
2. Rent rackspace in a datacenter, located in the desired country
3. Reassign the IP addresses to the datacenter and route all traffic through it.

While this may fool smaller websites that work with GEO IP databases, it won’t necessarily help with big players such as Google. Google operates on the Autonomous System level. Meaning, it can simply look at the peering point from which external traffic enters the corporate network and this is where proxy service providers tend to mess up.

Running a proxy service means having to shovel vast amounts of traffic through a detour. Since most proxy providers aren’t big enough to run their own network infrastructure, they need an uplink which will charge them by the gigabyte. Obviously, they’ll go with whoever offers them the lowest peering costs, which means they are effectively becoming part of someone else’s AS. In other words, it no longer matters where the servers are located physically. All traffic from and to them them goes through pipes that may connect to the internet backbone in a completely different country.