my server is a phone now

Modern rootable ARM64 phones provide a low-power, battery-backed (built-in UPS) alternative to VPS for light personal infrastructure.

Key Points

• The author replaced a Hetzner VPS with a rooted CMF Phone 1 (8 cores, 8GB RAM) to host personal services, including a remote browser (Surf), a finance tracker, and a screen sharing service.
• The architecture utilizes a layered approach: Android as the hardware abstraction layer $\to$ Termux as the host environment $\to$ runit for service supervision $\to$ chroot for Debian ARM64 application compatibility.
• Performance optimization: Transitioning from proot-distro to a rooted chroot significantly reduced syscall overhead and latency, which was critical for the Chromium-based Surf workload.
• Infrastructure management is handled via Ansible, treating the phone as an immutable target where releases are pinned by OCI image digests and deployed via atomic symlinks.
• Connectivity is achieved through Cloudflare Tunnels for public HTTP ingress and Tailscale for private administrative access, allowing the server to remain reachable across different networks.