I found a few old phones from my family. II cleaned them, installed LineageOS and rooted most of them. On one I installed postmarketOS, one is still stock Android and one is lets say bricked (after installing lineagesos it stay on boot logo for ever, before that I installed lineageos and nethunter on it). One one disk encryption doesnt work for some reason.
Phones (all samsung galaxy):
- S4
- A5
- A5 (bricked)
- A5 (postmarketOS)
- J3
- J4+ (no encryption)
- A31 (stock)
What can I do with them? Something like Monero node or Tor relay, but I’m already running that on old pc. For something that needs speed I have rpis (like a website). Camera security system? Tracking device?
Is it possible to run (and autorun) cli apps and/or services that can access interent, bluetooth, gps, sensors, camera, files, etc. just like on linux? I’m a programmer and I don’t like making normal android apps for a simple project.
To run Linux CLI apps, install termux from f-droid and a few of its add-ons. It’s nice, you can run sshd on the phone and ssh into it from your computer over USB.
Note that a lot of those older phones are no longer usable as phones, at least in most of the US, because of the 2g and 3g shutdowns and stickiness about LTE/4G. But yeah, they are little tiny computers with cameras and sensors and a screen, etc.