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.
Yeah my server is an i5 using an onboard GPU so it’s nothing crazy but it’s got 80TB of drive space, so I optimize for what I put my money into.
Hell, sometimes it’s even easier to copy the data to my gaming rig, transcode it, and rsync it back. If I’m done playing for the night and about to go to bed and I have like a TV show or something I know has to be transcoded, I’ll just queue up a job and let it run while I’m sleeping and script it so it rsyncs everything back when it’s done transcoding.
That’s definitely a good call. Before I even had a NAS, I’d just throw some movies and stuff on my macbook when I had to travel. Problem is that when you’re loading it up, you think you know what you’ll want to watch and then later you just wish you had different choices.