My server is a phone now

The author repurposed a CMF Phone 1 smartphone as a personal server to replace a paid VPS, running web apps like a remote browser, finance tracker, and screen sharing service on its eight ARM cores and 8GB RAM. After initially attempting to replace Android with a Linux distribution (which bricked the device), the author realized Android's existing drivers and infrastructure were superior, and instead kept Android while running Linux applications on top of it. The phone now successfully serves as a functioning server with persistent deployment capabilities and network resilience, proving that the existing Android ecosystem was better suited for this use case than a bare Linux alternative.