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

  • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    People who downvote, care to explain? You clearly never tried to access the Internet / install modern software on a Windows XP computer :)

    • Wander@yiffit.netEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Am curious. Are you able to run a modern windows 10 virtual machine / virtualbox vm on XP?

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I just talking about that: https://lemmy.world/comment/4731273

        It doesn’t appear to be possible. The Vmware version that supports the latest Windows 10/11 won’t support a host system older than Windows 8. The same applies to VirtualBox.

        The usual issue with that is that the modern OS requires drivers for the virtual devices and if you get a modern version of Vmware it won’t run on Windows XP (https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/90060) if you get an older version of Vmware that does run on XP it won’t have / be compatible with the drivers required for Windows 11 to work.