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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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The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android? (packmates.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

cc: @selfhosted
#selfhosted #selfhosting

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[–] TheHobbyist 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think there's some truth to it. But I imagine it will be more AOSP than what android is with google services. AOSP is really a great operating system with very good security and built in features. And with neural engines and high bandwidth emmc, it is mostly just lacking a large amount of storage to make it all complete, but the latest SOCs are most probably powerful enough. Is there something like docker for android? :)

Edit: I do recognize what someone else said, which is that one big challenge would be software updates. We are not that limited by hardware when we consider servers, they can easily run for years with regular software updates.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@TheHobbyist I replied to a similar post mentioning updates.

To be honest it does suck that Android is so fickle with updates and it sucks even more that flashing a rom is such a hard (and scary) task for the type of user that would benefit from this the most.

Maybe the environment running the actual server software is virtualized, like a VM or layer between the phone's OS and server software that can be updated without requiring flashing.

I think termux does this? Isn't termux virtualized / emulated in some way?