Looks like their website is hosted on a low-powered Android as well… at least it doesn’t load at all here. Edit: now it worked
That said: I tried it before and while it does work it ended up being too limited and annoying. I am planning to try again with a device that has basic PostmarketOS support though. Not enough to be usable as a phone, but as a server it might work if I can get the network over USB work reliably.
The value proposition of old or used android phones as SBCs is insane! You’ve probably got some in your drawers, or can at worst buy some carrier locked ones for 30$. You get a device with better compute than a raspberry pi, with a screen, cameras, speakers, flashlight and battery attached!
Personally, I use them to run and monitor my 3d printers.
In my experience using an older android phone for self-hosting, the downside was a lack of ports and I/O. Being stuck with a single USB 2 interface and wifi was less than ideal for my use case.
Imagine the single USB C port being 40Gbit/s or even 80Gbit/s (USB 4 Version 2). Given a nice docking station and some additional enclosures, you could technically even connect hard drives and run the phone as a low-power NAS. Or/and as a multimedia station for your 4K TV, I mean the integrated GPUs are usually more than capable enough.
A bummer that they stick to USB 2 speeds, even for most high end phones.
I don’t have a particular guide at the tip of my fingers, but I can share some recommendations based on my experience:
prefer a phone with USB-c if you plan on connecting USB things to it. the otg adapters for micro-b are kinda hit and miss when it comes to keeping the phone connected to power as well.
look out for clearances of those carrier locked prepaid phones from physical stores, you can get nice devices for nearly nothing
whatever you’re running on the phone, make sure it starts at startup, so you don’t need to go launching everything if you reboot for some reason
if the phone is"mission critical" e.g. random restart while in the middle of a print is unacceptable, turn off all the automatic updates and such.
a VNC server has been helpful, to remotely poke at the phone if I’m too lazy to go do it physically
get something that’ll keep the screen off the phone on. I’ve encountered reduced performance regardless of what battery optimizations I’ve turned off without doing that but YMMV depending on ROM.
I fully expect the screen thing and the batteries bring in there constantly charging to kill the phones I’m using eventually, but it’s something I expect and accept. my octoprint phones have been fine so far, for a bit over a year 🤷♂️
If you wanted to do something like this you could put the charger on one of those electrical plugs with a timer, or a smart plug that’s switched on when the battery reaches a certain threshold
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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
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selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
I’ve tried hosting an nginx server. It is fun, but I wouldn’t rely on it for production use cases.
I’ve also seen some people run docker on their android devices.
Looks like their website is hosted on a low-powered Android as well… at least it doesn’t load at all here. Edit: now it worked
That said: I tried it before and while it does work it ended up being too limited and annoying. I am planning to try again with a device that has basic PostmarketOS support though. Not enough to be usable as a phone, but as a server it might work if I can get the network over USB work reliably.
I ran a Minecraft server on termux and (IIRC) AnLinux once. It worked surprisingly well.
The value proposition of old or used android phones as SBCs is insane! You’ve probably got some in your drawers, or can at worst buy some carrier locked ones for 30$. You get a device with better compute than a raspberry pi, with a screen, cameras, speakers, flashlight and battery attached!
Personally, I use them to run and monitor my 3d printers.
In my experience using an older android phone for self-hosting, the downside was a lack of ports and I/O. Being stuck with a single USB 2 interface and wifi was less than ideal for my use case.
Imagine the single USB C port being 40Gbit/s or even 80Gbit/s (USB 4 Version 2). Given a nice docking station and some additional enclosures, you could technically even connect hard drives and run the phone as a low-power NAS. Or/and as a multimedia station for your 4K TV, I mean the integrated GPUs are usually more than capable enough.
A bummer that they stick to USB 2 speeds, even for most high end phones.
USB/IP for a KVM switch might still work, as long as termux supports all that
I have an old phone as a bedside clock with Home Assistant as the Dash
Do you have good resources, advice or experiences to share for somebody wanting to set their old Androids to work?
I don’t have a particular guide at the tip of my fingers, but I can share some recommendations based on my experience:
I fully expect the screen thing and the batteries bring in there constantly charging to kill the phones I’m using eventually, but it’s something I expect and accept. my octoprint phones have been fine so far, for a bit over a year 🤷♂️
The battery might prove to be a liability.
Yeah, if they are old enough those might be removable? Then again, from that time period they might be slower than RPis…
I’ve worry about the battery, being plugged in for ages, without some sort of additional BMS like AccA.
If you wanted to do something like this you could put the charger on one of those electrical plugs with a timer, or a smart plug that’s switched on when the battery reaches a certain threshold
Battery will be destroyed (unless it has a “kiosk” mode). But not really gonna matter since it will live on the charger in perpetuity (theoretically).
I worry about it inflating. “Spicy pillow” or whatever.
Fair.
you can run tor on it
If only modern kernels weren’t a problem. I wish you could just install new OSs like on PC.
I am trying to lear basic HTML/CSS/JavaScript ( again, last learned HTML back in the 1990’s, am using “JavaScript: The Good Parts” & other books ),
& have discovered that you can have, on the same phone/tablet, Termux/Nginx running,
you have to feed /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/etc/nginx/nginx.conf the root-dir you want it to use
( which is actually in a proot-distro install, down below
/data/data/llcom.termux/files/usr/var/lib/proot-distro/installed-rootfs/ … )
… and then you can have your browser hit
http://localhost:8080/
and it’ll grab index.html.
Notice that that is http, NOT httpS.
None of the browsers I’ve tried can get the default connection to localhost, because they all default to https, & nginx isn’t serving https.
That wasted an entire fscking day, to discover.
Now learning can begin!
If phone has supported USB networking and close to mainline kernel in PostmarketOS, you can try that.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
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