Getting Started

Getting Started

This page walks through installing Tetherand on a Solana Seeker for the first time.

What you'll need

• A Solana Seeker, factory-reset and signed in to your account.
• A laptop (macOS or Linux) with the Android platform-tools installed (adb must be on your $PATH).
• A USB-C cable.
• Optional but recommended: an RTL-SDR dongle (about $30) and a USB-C OTG cable for the SDR detection path.

Step 1 — Enable Developer Options on the Seeker

1. Open Settings → About phone.
2. Tap Build number seven times.
3. Go back, open System → Developer options.
4. Turn on USB debugging.

Step 2 — Plug into the laptop

Connect the Seeker to the laptop via USB-C. On the phone, accept the "Allow USB debugging?" prompt and tick "Always allow from this computer".

Verify the device is visible:

adb devices

You should see one line with device after the serial number.

Step 3 — Download the APK

Grab the latest signed release from the releases page. Two convenient choices:

• tetherand.apk — the full bundle with every native library embedded. Best if you want to use every privacy hop without rebuilding.
• A specific subset zip from dist/bundles/ — extract its lib/arm64-v8a/ contents into a fresh repo clone if you want to customise which hops are bundled.

Step 4 — Verify the download

This step matters and is described in detail at Verifying Downloads. At minimum, run:

shasum -a 256 tetherand.apk
openssl dgst -sha3-256 tetherand.apk

Both should match the tetherand.apk.sha256 and tetherand.apk.sha3-256 sidecar files from the same release page.

Step 5 — Install

adb install -r tetherand.apk

You should see Success.

Step 6 — Pre-grant VPN consent

Tetherand uses the Android VpnService API for the privacy chain. By default each VPN service launch shows a confirmation dialog the first time. To skip that dialog:

adb shell cmd appops set dev.tetherand.app ACTIVATE_VPN allow

Step 7 — Launch the app

Tap the & icon on the Seeker. You should land on the Tether tab.

The bottom navigation has four tabs:

• Tether — start and stop the laptop-tether.
• Privacy — compose the privacy chain.
• Threat — see cellular and Wi-Fi alerts, hardened mode controls, incident response.
• AI — AI Guard defenses and field guide.

Step 8 — First tether

Back on the laptop, with tetherand on your $PATH:

tetherand run

This sets up adb reverse and starts the relay. On the phone, the Tether tab now shows the VPN service running.

That's the minimum viable setup. From here:

• Privacy Chain — add WireGuard, Tor, Nym, Mullvad.
• Threat Detection — what the alerts mean.
• Hardened Mode — one-tap DEFCON lockdown.