A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones(research.google) |
A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones(research.google) |
You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network.
Google notably does well here with 7 years of support, but others such as Sony are 4 years, and Xiaomi on non-flagship devices are similar, or Samsung on their lowest budget models...
Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches. They're doing it for more practical reasons, like the phone getting slow, the battery wearing out, or wanting a better camera.
Moreover being able to replace firmware blobs/kernels/whatever doesn't mean such updates will actually materialize. For lineageos, many phones are stuck on 22.2 (android 15) because android 16 requires linux 5.4 and above, which means phones with earlier kernels are out of luck. Prior to this, there were phones from as early as 2016 (eg. the original Pixel) that could be upgraded to the latest Android. This isn't a "firmware blobs" or "locked down systems" problem. The kernel sources are available, and the kernel can be replaced, but nobody is going to bother upgrading the kernel for a 10 year old phone.
https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/#legacy-devices
>You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network.
This depends on the use case. If you're using this as some sort of NAS or compute cluster running trusted workloads, you should be fine as long as there isn't some sort of RCE in the kernel.
Apple just shipped iOS 27, which has support for 2019's iPhone 11. So we are around 7 years there. It's probably fine for many people's use!
For a task like openclaw or hermes, or even something more aggressively graphical & GUI, it's not hard to imagine an 8 year old phone doing fine.
But... if Google can do so if handed a random pile of old phones, then why would a consumer not be given the same option for their phones? If it works only for phones sold by Google once, same question holds. And applies to other vendors.
As you said: the "phone becomes useless just because OEM drops support" cycle needs to be broken. Well.. that and ability for end-users to replace batteries, screen, fix connectors etc.
Also it's unclear how data would move in & out of these old-phone-compute-nodes. USB-C? Article is a bit light on details there.
End users don’t need to replace screens, ports and batteries if there is reasonable cost parts and skilled labour available.
I’m happy with a trade off where a device has extreme miniaturisation and water resistance but needs someone with some surface mount soldering skill and the right tools to work on it.
Regardless, many (most?) phones hardware will last longer than the software running on it.
I would think the main factor against such clusters is cost. Even if the four year old phones are free, they have to be dismantled, tested, and supporting hardware/software has to be developed. All of that would have to be done on an ongoing basis. While Google may have the volume to be able to build uniform clusters with a given generation of hardware, generations are measured in months. Using four year old hardware also trims four years off the expected life expectancy of the components, and that is comparing like to like (not consumer grade hardware to server grade hardware). I've got to wonder how all of that extra work affects the carbon-footprint they are trying to reduce. It would probably be more effective to increase the use life of the phone as a phone.
All of that is fine for a research project or, on smaller scales, hobby projects. It would be extraordinarily difficult to make it commercially viable.
So, OEM just have to let us unlock the bootloader, just let us unlock it after they stop selling it, and it would reduce so much waste.
They are just so greedy
Does anyone in the industry know why so much firmware is proprietary?
It's also a huge pain in the ass for them to release software as open source. They would need to track all the different forks and modifications in an organized manner (they often do a lot of copy paste and one-off nonsense). They run pretty light staffing on a lot of these components and doing all of that is just another chore for their overworked devs.
Lastly, I've heard they sometimes use other commercial, closed-source software components which they can't easily relicense.
Is this all bullshit? Yes absolutely. I'm not defending them but these are the excuses they give.
The article seems to refer to a 2023 Pixel Fold as one of their candidates - I guess a good opportunity if those fragile screens get damaged but not a cheap used device otherwise.
Even normal slab pixel devices have limited support for true android replacements like PostmarketOS let alone cheaper 3rd party devices usually running Mediatek/Exnos SOC that have zero open docs or support.
Couldn't Google somehow fix this? Since they control the substrate (Android) and they would be doing it for their convenience
They're actively working on closing the ecosystem even more (no more sideloading), DRM features, etc.
Maybe they'd do it for themselves, but they clearly don't want you, the customer, to do whatever you want with the device you bought and paid for.
It’s a genuine shame how locked down iPhones are compared to even Android. Hypothetically you could run Linux inside UTM[0] but outside the EU Apple makes it intentionally difficult, and there’s still memory restrictions and performance penalties.
My group’s senior year project was a computing cluster on phones (specifically targetting LLM inference) [1]. Instead of installing a new OS we built separate apps per OS. Our devices were older, so the Android phones had worse hardware and the iPhones had more software restraints.
[0] https://getutm.app/ [1] https://github.com/orgs/rmcluster/repositories
[0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jsJ5euZ4VXcwL4fbgJKM...
I personally have lots of batch jobs like CFD simulations that could easily run on a fleet of phones with no real reliability issues, and I’d love to reuse old hardware and give it a second life. I’m already considering running old servers from e.g ETB but the cycles per watt on a phone are probably much better.
Yet I 100% agree on a generic computing device and they're not really that different in the end. Maybe that it needs to be unlockable after it has been on the market for 4 years or so (all units, no matter when they were sold, no matter if support ended)
Or maybe undercutting the competition like this to make it back later on games is not a profit model we should want? And that everything should just be unlockable insofar as it has X amount of memory, CPU power, capable of doing IP traffic... something like that. (Seems silly to require a firmware unlock on your toaster)
Sure it’s fair, and manufacturers could price accordingly. Legally enforceable is another story.
To be honest that has always had a smell to me akin to dumping.
I think there should be a 20 year rule for all released commercial software to release the source code outside of national security concerns.
Does anyone have recommendations for novels, movies or video games with that topic?
In general, you should look into the ‘solarpunk’ genre, especially post-apocalyptic solarpunk.
https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/
Also I guess Silo / WOOL by Hugh Howey is perhaps closer to what you wrote literally but probably not quite the vibe maybe.
- Are these phone processors really as computer-pet-watt efficient as a regular data center processor?
- There’s so little embodied carbon in a phone motherboard - and presumably some embodied carbon in whatever custom racking res up is being used to house these. Is that really compute-power-per-embodied-carbon-footprint efficient than making a new server?
So people are to blame, not the companies shoveling ads, offering promotions to buy new phones, and in general creating the huge demand that they later, "are forced to satisfy".
???
You can still install alternate OSes (eg. grapheneos) on their latest phones.
>And now, they're making it illegal to install custom apps too: https://keepandroidopen.org/
Besides the questionable use of "illegal" (what are they going to do, send you to jail?), that's not even accurate. You can still install apps after a 24 hour wait, or no wait at all if you use adb.
The article is pretty clear in the opening lines that this is a Google Research grant to the University of California, not even primarily done by Google employees.
I wonder how long this takes per phone. Presumably it could be a pretty fast shucking process if you don't care about any of the other components. I can't see it making much economic sense if it takes more than 1 minute/phone.
This earlier comment referenced it :)
From my observations, phones get destroyed, used until the battery swells and breaks them, or handed down to kids or less careful users. No one I know has a bunch of old phones that are still useful but unused.
I recycled them wheb carriers decided to block a bunch of phones.