Just for shiggles, I setup and ran a minecraft Java server on an old phone for a little while. I did this through Termux.

It was surprisingly good.

Counterpoint: spicy pillows

I was going to host pihole on an old android until I noticed it getting quite warm while continuously connected to power. Realised I didn't know the lifespan of the battery and didn't want it tp start a fire.

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.

@Wander @selfhosted Unlikely, the biggest issue android devices have is hardware support due to the ARM CPU architecture. It's just not as useful as old x86 hardware, you're stuck with old outdated and vulnerable firmware. My opinion is that one of the selling points of ARM hardware for device vendors is it's relative impossibility to get open source driver support. You may see some use of Apple M1 and M2 simply because it's a smaller FOSS support target, but android devices vary too much.

I'd rather use a real OS, thank you

@Wander @selfhosted I in fact already use android for syncthing.