When you consider the price of a used android (ie. Oneplus 6T for $80 on ebay) and compare it spec for spec with a raspberry pi, it’s actually a really good deal. Like you get:
Built in backup power supply (battery)
8-core power-efficient CPU (SDM845)
Embedded sensors (microphone, magnetometer, gyro)
The way I set mine up is to run the server directly on Android using Termux, having an app autostart Termux on boot, and making sure to disable battery optimizations on the app. And then I just had the phone always plugged into the outlet to maintain the battery (and of course android would just trickle charge / disable once full charged).
Of course this isn’t perfect because you still have much more variability in play (at the OS level) than an RPi (along with not having a standard environment like debian unless you use proot), but it overall is a very powerful setup that works quite well.
When you consider the price of a used android (ie. Oneplus 6T for $80 on ebay) and compare it spec for spec with a raspberry pi, it’s actually a really good deal. Like you get:
The way I set mine up is to run the server directly on Android using Termux, having an app autostart Termux on boot, and making sure to disable battery optimizations on the app. And then I just had the phone always plugged into the outlet to maintain the battery (and of course android would just trickle charge / disable once full charged).
Of course this isn’t perfect because you still have much more variability in play (at the OS level) than an RPi (along with not having a standard environment like debian unless you use proot), but it overall is a very powerful setup that works quite well.