I tried hosting podcasts but I didn't make it.

Yes. Works fine. PostmarketOS, though, not Lineage. It runs an offsite monitoring system for the rest of my selfhosted stuff - Prometheus, Grafana, stuff.

If you use a Syncthing app on android, you're technically running a server (Syncthing) in the background.

That's pretty much the only server I run though.

i used to host some simple website and sftp/webdav fileshare a long time ago. it works. its just a computer

i used to use my old phones as security cameras feeding into the motion app and set them up to buffer recordings if they lost contact. fwiw

I don't see why you couldn't use a phone as a server as long as the battery doesn't cause problems.

I've never done it but I have heard of people using their old phones as a NAS (network attached storage). The closest I've ever done was to connect two of my android devices together via Bluetooth and use that to transfer files between the two devices. It's slow but it works.

Could you do something similar as this for your battery?

Newer phones don't open as easy.

Great Scott Video

I wouldn't trust an old battery, nope

(I rather use free tiers of paas providers or rent a vps that anyway is as cheap as electricity. The issue there is going to be storage, then you need a homelab or nas and setup tunnels for apps like nextcloud. That's what I am doing.)

No, I was fortunate enough to pick up a bunch of decommissioned Celeron mini PCs from work. I run a NAS with media server on one, pi-hole on another, and a test server on a third. I meant to make things accessible from outside with VPN, but was too lazy.

Back when rooting was all the rage I tinkered with hosting various services. It just didn't make much sense for such an underpowered device, amongst other reasons (battery swelling).

I did use an old phone to "host" a game automation. One of those "idle clicker" / RPG games since I'm so lazy. After about 2 months the battery swelled and popped the back cover off. That was the end to that idea..

==============================
 STATUS  August 18, 2026 12:39 AM
==============================

[off]  battlimit
[off]  sshd
[off]  caddy
[off]  cloudflared
[off]  boot automation
[off]  sleep lock

------ battery ------
level : 56%
status  : Discharging
limit  : 0
current  : -355,000 uA
temperature : 340 (tenths of a degree)

I set this up using Termux. When "battlimit" is enabled, it caps the battery charge at 60% and the device runs solely on USB power. I also had the chance to configure Caddy, Cloudflare, and others. With Termux, I can easily turn these on and off via a widget. They start up without any issues every time I reboot.