Back in 2009, anynone with a Nokia could have a personal website running on their own phone. Sadly this amazing piece of tech was never widely adopted. Today’s phone are far more powerful than those Nokias both in performance and battery backup and still we don’t see anyone running a server on their phone. Why?
I think this was never implemented on phones because there’s no incentive for large corporations to work on something like this.
I’m not so sure. India isn’t known for its high spend on Amazon cloud fees. Billions of people are stuck behind mobile 4G with little spending money to actually host anything.
Free services exist, but they’re far less capable than just hosting a simple server on an old phone stuck to a charger in a cupboard somewhere. I’ve used shared hosting for ages and it’s just not great.
Data costs are a thing, but there are a lot of “unlimited 2G speed” subscriptions that provide opportunities for personal projects and services.
There are options, of course. Tor works well for hosting a service and it’s pretty secure too. Remembering the hostname and linking others is just a huge pain.
If you’re sticking an old device into a closet stuck to a charger, a phone is like the worst thing for that. Heck, even an old laptop running Linux would probably allow you to charge it, have an external HDD, and Ethernet at the same time, which already puts it miles ahead of a phone.
Android is open source, so if you really want to do this with an old device, you can build yourself a custom rom and do so. But there is no way that it’s a good play for Google to spend engineering time and resources to build something that is at best a poor replacement for countless existing solutions.
I think a root app that runs on Android 4 would work but the devs would have to implement modern standards (TLS 1.2) themselves, the performance would be bad and the phone will probably have known security vulnerabilities.