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Comment by shtack | Hacker News Reader

I have an old iPhone SE plugged in and running a simple web server via (disclosure: my app) http://pocketweb.io

The two sample pages seen there are hosted from this phone.

Edit: There's an Android version available as well.

I still use the iPhone SE as a daily driver and there is an active second-hand market for them. I understand that it's spare tech but this could be done by an SoC board that costs less than $50. The iPhone, even a small one, has an expensive touch screen. You could probably sell an iPhone SE for at least $110, enough for a couple of Raspberry Pi 4 4GB systems. That's a cool project but it is a puzzling use of hardware.

So the app actually works in the background and is meant to serve web pages from your daily driver phone (ie. out of your pocket). This particular phone is plugged in just because it serves the example pages which get higher traffic and should have higher uptime.

Your not wrong, but for some people keeping the device vs going through the trouble to try to sell it is easier.

Could you say a bit more (provide some links) explaining this active second-hand market? I love my SE!

I don't know how active it is now, but last summer I was trying to decide whether to upgrade as I love my SE but it was starting to feel slow (thanks Apple!). Back then, eBay has lots and lots of "new" ones at every spec level, and some foreign shops were still selling new-in-box ones at the lower spec levels.

I ended up buying an 8, by the way, and I like it much much less than I liked my SE, though it is a lot faster and the pictures are a little better. Still have the SE as a backup phone and because my banking software has no option to move between devices once configured. (Thank you Commerzbank!)

If you use your SE with one hand, be aware it is the last model of iPhone that can be used that way. Starting with the 6, all the larger ones have impossible reach from the bottom-right (typing) to the top-left (navigation), unless you have massive hands I suppose. In retrospect I wish I'd bought a couple of refurb SE's and not ever done a major-version iOS upgrade.

There are only a few niche phones on the market in the US right now that can be used with one hand. I know because I insist upon it and haven't been able to buy a new phone (I also insist upon being able to run a fully de-googled LineageOS or similar ROM). So I use a Motorola Moto E 2015 model and will continue to indefinitely, until there is a phone that fits my required specifications.

There are a few small phones available, but most of them are too small like the Palm phone or Unihertz Atom. There's nothing that's just normal with a 4" - 4.5" screen.

If you touch twice on the home button, the contents of the screen move down to alleviate this.

Any alternative for Android?

Edit: How is this working? I'm behind double NAT and other http servers do not work.

It's not a server in the true sense of the word. We piggyback on push notifications (proxied through our backend) to respond to requests. So really your phone's polling for requests, but it's a poll that it's already doing for push notifications.

The website has a link to the Play Store..

This is really neat. What are the limitations on what you can host? Are they just static sites?

Just static sites for now, although you could have them talk to a backend somewhere else. A longterm goal is to allow basic backend code to run on the phone as well (ie. a simple wrapper around sqlite).

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