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Wander ΘΔ :verified_paw: @packmates.org

The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?

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

104 comments

  • I mean, android is fine I guess, but it's being pushed to be less and less able to be separated from Google. I think for a lot of people interested in self hosting, there's a low amount of interest in it because of that.

    • @southsamurai Oh that's definitely a huge concern, but not just for self-hosting but for privacy in general.

      But still, if the average joe wants to self-host something using an old phone is probably the easiest way to get them to try self-hosted alternatives and drop corporate / commercial services.

      Maybe not the 'average average joe' such as my parents, but anyone who is minimally curious enough to do stuff such as registering a domain, setting up a game server for friends and maybe has opened the CMD windows console once or twice in the past following a tutorial. That kind of demographic (IDK if it has a name) might be much more inclined to self-host if it was as easy as installing an APK and letting your phone one somewhere at home.

      Overall as long as Android doesn't become straight out malicious spyware itself, the benefit of dropping commercial alternatives might very well be a net positive. In a worst-case scenario, any tunnel / vpn configuration necessary to expose a service to the internet could also add an automated step to blackhole requests to google's tracking servers.

  • Hmm I think my main concern would be lack of kernel/firmware updates, running something like postmarketOS could partly solve that and still be nearly as easy to set up (just unlock and flash a prebuilt image)

    But firmware is still almost entirely dependent on the vendor, since it's all signed and unpatchable.

    Next issue would be lack of connectivity on a lot of phones, which have gone backwards and include USB 2.0 now. WiFi is an option, but less stable, I personally decided to just go 100Mbps and suffer.

    As for the battery, it would help a lot if phones were designed to boot without one and they were removable, it all worked well for about half a year until I found out I had a spicy pillow and had to replace it with direct power to the board, which made the whole setup much less elegant and required soldering.

    It all comes down to how devices are designed in the end. If someone took the time to make a computer instead of just a phone, and included features that make it useful past its initial life that aren't that popular (display output, microsd, headphone jack), mainlined all the drivers and maintained firmware, that would be a different story.

    But that's not a very profitable model, because it's all about reducing waste and thus selling less. A lot needs to change.

  • The future of selfhosted services might includes phones yes, Android most likely not.

    Think about it, those phones might work right now but in 10 years their Android versions will not support anything, they wont even have root certificate updates breaking SSL, the kernel will be missing support for whatever people need and whatnot. Maybe the phones won't even boot because some key will expire somewhere... let alone security vulnerabilities.

    People selfhost on 10-year old hardware right now, but they do install modern Linux distros that are well supported and up to date. I believe the most likely scenario is that at some point the "security" of most of that hardware will be broken and you'll be able to run some version of AOSP for older hardware and/or a generic Linux.

    But that might not ever happen, those phones are built like hell and we've another category of hardware with similar characteristics that was never repurposed for anything after a decade - routers. It's common to see older routers that are now too slow when it comes to wifi or even CPU and although they're way more open and primitive than modern smartphones when it comes to software we usually can't even repurpose them as dumb switches with alternative / open software. OpenWRT and DD-WRT might work in some case but those are exceptions and usually those models were already supported by those firmwares. For instance there are enough Thomson / Technicolor TG784n ISP provided routers to create a second moon and the effort to break their security and create a usual firmware is so much that nobody did it. It's just easier to pay 30€ for a cheap router/switch and move on.

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

    • @TCB13 I'm not an expert in the matter but I wonder how large the attack surface actually is for a web service that has a single port exposed via a tunnel which can even contribute to doing some security filtering.

      The application / server component can actually be updated since it's just an APK. And someone else in this thread actually linked to whole linux distros that can be installed and run without root. In theory even if the underlying OS is insecure, more secure OSes can be installed on top, or risk can be severely limited by only exposing a single port.

      Basically, while flashing a new ROM would be ideal, I think there's likely a way in which a sandboxed and possibly even updated environment with updated TLS cyphers, CA stores, etc... can be run in a secure manner on top of a stock Android ROM.

      Furthermore, developers packaging their apps into APKs could run security checks and by the time it says "your OS is insecure" you're already on your third phone and can host stuff on your second. I mean... Android phones are in their prime for two/three years at most in my experience :P

      • The application / server component can actually be updated since it’s just an APK. And someone else in this thread actually linked to whole linux distros that can be installed and run without root. In theory even if the underlying OS is insecure, more secure OSes can be installed on top, or risk can be severely limited by only exposing a single port.

        When you install another one "on top" you're essentially speaking about a very thin layer above the base OS. In most cases that's simply a container that uses the base OS kernel. This is what happens today and it works for a while but it comes a point (way less than 10 years) when you won't be able to have a modern top layer OS sitting on such older base OS because the kernel is way too old to support the requirements of the new OS.

        Even if go through the trouble of virtualization in order to have the top layer running a modern kernel it will most likely fail. It would require a LOT more effort coding the support for the old hardware and a ton of other virtualization pains to just end with a very slow system. We've examples of this: it is next to impossible to virtualize Windows 11 in a Pentium 4 that runs Windows XP, for instance a versions of Vmware that supports Windows 11 won't support a host system older than Windows 8. The same applies to VirtualBox.

        Basically, while flashing a new ROM would be ideal,

        Yes it would but for that you would have to completely break the phone's boot security and that isn't feasible in all cases. Most phones doesn't allow you to unlock the bootloader thus you can't install another ROM/OS. Even on those you can some will only accept software that was signed by the manufacturer so unless there's a leak of the key they use or it gets bruteforced in some way you won't be able to do it.

        Take older routers as examples, those don't even protect the firmware, nothing is signed, and yet the time and effort (weeks/months) required to make a simple open firmware to turn a SINGLE model into a dumb switches / routers that it isn't worth it - after all you can get a < 30€ device today that is faster and more power efficient than those old units.

        With phones things are considerable worse as modern day devices are way more locked down than those router ever were. There's also way more fragmentation (hundreds of phone models all running very specific hardware and software hacks). It's very likely that in 10 years you'll be able to buy some ARM / RISC board, such as a raspberry pi, that is open, run a modern OS out of the box and most likely cost you 30€.

  • @selfhosted Update:

    1. Just to clarify, the the whole point is that Android makes it easy for less tech oriented people to host small single user / family services.

    It does not need to be perfect, have massive throughput or allow for massive amounts of read/write cycles.

    If people can host their own media server like Jellyfin or note taking apps like Joplin instead of using commercial services by simply installing an APK on an old phone they can leave connected at home, that's already a big win.

    1. Regarding device longevity, Android 13 apparently supports / will support full KVM emulation. Windows can be run if you have root while android based VMs are expected to be possible without the need for root. Since this type of virtualization allows VMs to run their own kernel, keeping the "server app" updated should allow the user to be protected even if the host OS is outdated as long as these server-app-VMs are trustworthy themselves.

    • Regarding device longevity, Android 13 apparently supports / will support full KVM emulation. Windows can be run if you have root while android based VMs are expected to be possible without the need for root. Since this type of virtualization allows VMs to run their own kernel, keeping the “server app” updated should allow the user to be protected even if the host OS is outdated as long as these server-app-VMs are trustworthy themselves

      Guess you missed this: https://lemmy.world/comment/4731273

      Having virtualization doesn't ensure future success. Not when the timeframe is something like more than 8 years.

  • It has an UPS builtin 😇

    Jokes aside I used to run a few python bots inside termux on my very old S3 Mini a few years ago. It did the job at least.

  • @Wander @selfhosted This sort of setup is very attractive IMO because of the low power usage. Android phones use much less power than old PCs.

    The main con I see is not having ethernet (maybe there's some sort of MicroUSB/USB-C to ethernet adapter, but I didn't look into it yet). That, and there being only one port.

  • @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.

104 comments