The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?
The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?
The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?
Wait, what?
Think about it. At some point everyone has had an old phone lying around. They are designed to be constantly connected, constantly on... and even have a battery and potentially still a SIM card to survive power outages.
We just need to make it easy to create APK packaged servers that can avoid battery-optimization kills and automatically configure an outbound tunnel like ngrok, zerotrust, etc...
The goal: hosting services like #nextcloud, #syncthing, #mastodon!? should be as easy as installing an APK and leaving an old phone connected to a spare charger / outlet.
It would be tempting to have an optimized ROM, but if self-hosting is meant to become more commonplace, installing an APK should be all that's needed. #Android can do SSH, VPN and other tunnels without the need for root, so there should be no problem in using tunnels to publicly expose a phone/server in a secure manner.
In regards to the suitability of home-grade broadband, I believe that it should not be a huge problem at least in Europe where home connections are most often unmetered: "At the end of June 2021, 70.2% of EU homes were passed by either FTTP or cable DOCSIS
3.1 networks, i.e. those technologies currently capable of supporting gigabit speeds."
Source: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/broadband-coverage-europe-2021
PS. syncthing actually already has an APK and is easy to use. Although I had to sort out some battery optimization stuff, it's a good example of what should become much more commonplace.
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I've already heard of people using Termux to host services on their old phones. Seems to work well.
Think about it, those phones might work right now but in 10 years their Android versions will not support anything, they wont even have root certificate updates breaking SSL, the kernel will be missing support for whatever people need and whatnot. Maybe the phones won’t even boot because some key will expire somewhere… let alone security vulnerabilities.
in 10 years? Is that a big deal? I've never had a single computer for 10 years.
Most people get a new phone every 2-3 years. If people use their 2 most recent phones as simple servers, then these are not 10 year old devices.
Damn, what a fucking waste of resources.
I wish I could predict the future too.
Just look at the past, software and hardware as way simpler and way less locked down and it doesn't work out. Just try to use a Windows XP to access the Internet and/or install modern software.
But that might not ever happen, those phones are built like hell (security restrictions and proprietary very custom stuff) and we’ve another category of hardware with similar characteristics that was never repurposed for anything after a decade - routers.
It’s common to see older routers that are now too slow when it comes to wifi or even CPU and although they’re way more open and primitive than modern smartphones when it comes to software we usually can’t even repurpose them as dumb switches with alternative / open software. OpenWRT and DD-WRT might work in some case but those are exceptions and usually those models were already supported by those firmwares. For instance there are enough Thomson / Technicolor TG784n ISP provided routers to create a second moon and the effort to break their security and create a usual firmware is so much that nobody did it. It’s just easier to pay 30€ for a cheap router/switch and move on.
All you have to do is look at the present... Android phones don't have super long software support. Best you're looking at is maybe 5 years. So, the user saying 10 years is well past that mark.
Looking at the present, I'm not aware of android devices not booting 10 years after they were released. In fact, my 2013 MotoX is still a perfectly usable phone for many purposes. I had to use it for a few weeks a couple years ago because my phone broke.