This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support.

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...

• RetroTechie

  today at 11:27 AM

  Obviously you'd have to replace the OS with an up-to-date one to use the phone as a cluster node.

  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.

  • djfergus

    today at 12:14 PM

    The lack of open, replaceable software is the main blocker. The article talks about only keeping the motherboard anyway.

    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.

• gruez

  today at 2:32 PM

  >This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support.

  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.

  • lukeschlather

    today at 4:49 PM

    > Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches.

    This becomes a practical reason more quickly than you think. If a company only provides 4 years of security updates and they only provide 2 android MV releases, you quickly become out of date. I had a BlackBerry Key2 that I bought in 2018, I had to replace it in 2024 and I was really holding onto it despite a lot of practical problems - Slack dropped support for the version of Android a year earlier, it was only when I tried to install Google Wallet and could not that I finally decided despite the hardware and software functioning fine it really wasn't practical to use a device that was stuck on such an old version of Android. (I would've tried to figure out the kernel myself if the bootloader wasn't locked.)

    • throw-the-towel

      today at 6:15 PM

      But that's feature updates, not security updates? If the manufacturer kept providing security patches for your old Android version, it wouldn't have helped you install Slack and Wallet.

  • jauntywundrkind

    today at 2:55 PM

    Phones don't actually get slower, or, they shouldn't, if they are reasonably well maintained. A battery swap might be necessary to preserve battery life under load. A NAND might start going bad.

    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.

    • jstummbillig

      today at 3:27 PM

      > Phones don't actually get slower, or, they shouldn't, if they are reasonably well maintained.

      Relative to ever rising hw requirements of apps they obviously get slower. That is why I personally buy new phones.

    • datadrivenangel

      today at 4:06 PM

      Have you ever owned an older phone or older computer in general? Whether hardware or software caused, they get slower.

      • msh

        today at 4:25 PM

        Only if the software gets slower. My 2015 MacBook Air is slow with the latest supported macOS but runs Linux super snappy for the same tasks.

    • carlosjobim

      today at 3:15 PM

      Battery swaps usually don't work very well, unfortunately.

      • zblibli

        today at 3:39 PM

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• II2II

  today at 1:18 PM

  The article seems to be fairly clear about this: it is Google focusing on Google phones (so unlocking the bootloader should not be an issue) and they did mention that the kernel would have to be replaced (albeit for other reasons).

  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.

• throw-the-towel

  today at 6:12 PM

  Which consumer ever cares about "security" updates on phones?

• djfergus

  today at 12:07 PM

  Exactly this. Few phones allow bootloader unlock let alone open drivers that can be brought forward to a mainline kernel.

  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.

• azkalam

  today at 12:26 PM

  Google has so much influence over the hardware manufacturers. They should do more.

  Does anyone in the industry know why so much firmware is proprietary?

  • xyzzy_plugh

    today at 2:53 PM

    I've worked with manufacturers who shipped us binary blobs for their hardware. They are often willing to customize the software for you, but they want to own the modifications, which they can use for other customers. A big part of many contracts is a services component where they provide features or advanced functionality, and this lets them mark up their bill substantially. They're existentially scared of their hardware being cloned or their customers building in-house solutions, so they have to stay competitive on that front.

    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.

• goodpoint

  today at 6:26 PM

  > proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems

  caused by the very same Google...

• t_mahmood

  today at 2:30 PM

  I'm using a OnePlus 7, as my daily driver. Because it was bootloader unlockable, and LineageOS exists, I still can use it. And it performs respectfully, and serves my purpose. Except, my banking software, and digital payment applications, all works

  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

• binyu

  today at 12:13 PM

  > This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems

  Couldn't Google somehow fix this? Since they control the substrate (Android) and they would be doing it for their convenience

  • redleader55

    today at 12:23 PM

    Unfortunately it is a bit more complicated than that. All these phones run firmware, bootloaders, libraries under license from SoC providers, who package components from other vendors under a license themselves. Opening up the bootloader can be done, but two things have to happen: either the phone is crippled of various functionalities or the manufacturer is in breach of license because all the binary blobs become open and can be reverse engineered. No one wants to go through all of this for a few hundred people who are interested in running their home assistant on an exotic device.

    • dvdkon

      today at 12:33 PM

      I haven't ever heard of an SoC supplier demanding that the device's bootloader must be locked. Are you sure that this is happening? I've only ever seen devices delete first-party blobs, presumably of the manufacturer's own volition.

      • realusername

        today at 2:03 PM

        Unisoc mandates locked bootloaders, but it's true, the majority doesn't care, they just want to sell the SOC

  • Elfener

    today at 1:59 PM

    They're literally doing the opposite, right now you can't install a custom operating system, but in the near future you won't be able to install custom apps either: https://keepandroidopen.org/

    • Gander5739

      today at 2:42 PM

      What do you mean you can't install a custom operating system? The bootloader is unlocked on google phones, isn't it?

    • aleksejs

      today at 2:40 PM

      You can install a custom operating system on (a non-carrier-locked model of) every phone Google has ever made.

  • ajsnigrutin

    today at 12:35 PM

    Why would they?

    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.

This is neat. This group’s approach of treating the devices as many weaker servers (basically a raspberry pi cluster) sounds like the most realistic way to reuse phone hardware at scale, especially with the backing of the actual hardware vendor.

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

• _fzslm

  today at 2:07 PM

  Really interesting project. Do you have a link to a writeup/paper?

  • wky

    today at 2:25 PM

    The closest thing would be our showcase poster[0], at some point I might write about the thought/development process (both for my sake and whoever picks up the project in the future)

    [0] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jsJ5euZ4VXcwL4fbgJKM...

I would love to see regulation that required making bootloaders unlockable to enable this sort of thing. People have been making clusters of consumer hardware for decades: I’m sure people remember the PS3 supercomputers of the mid 2000s.

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.

• lucb1e

  today at 12:13 PM

  Isn't the story that some gaming consoles were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales? I don't know if it's fair to require that needs to be unlocked

  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)

  • LastTrain

    today at 12:19 PM

    > I don't know if it's fair to require that needs to be unlocked

    Sure it’s fair, and manufacturers could price accordingly. Legally enforceable is another story.

  • IsTom

    today at 12:47 PM

    > were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales?

    To be honest that has always had a smell to me akin to dumping.

    • 627467

      today at 2:16 PM

      Differences between dumping and "loss leader"?

• AtlasBarfed

  today at 2:48 PM

  Make it a seven year rule: hardware vendors must release necessary source code for firmware, blobs, etc.

  I think there should be a 20 year rule for all released commercial software to release the source code outside of national security concerns.

  • bethekidyouwant

    today at 4:43 PM

    lol or what? How do you make people do a thing, anything, 20 years later?

    • wky

      today at 4:55 PM

      There are countries that require published material to be submitted to a national archive[0]. A similar system could be done for software source code and made public on expiry.

      [0] https://youtu.be/ZNVuIU6UUiM

Sometimes I have weird fantasies about a post apocalyptic world where factories burned down and people have to live with the tech that’s available. No network, just off site solar power or generators, only local devices. I think it’s interesting to think about how far we could get with this.

Does anyone have recommendations for novels, movies or video games with that topic?

• goodpoint

  today at 6:29 PM

  Are we still at the fantasy stage?

• GCUMstlyHarmls

  today at 1:17 PM

  Pump 6 and Other Stories has a few in that vein, sort of. Eg there are no petrol engines, instead compression springs, treadle operated computers, etc. There are some pretty grim stories in there, some may find them distasteful.

  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.

  • _shantaram

    today at 2:31 PM

    Chiming in to second this, Pump Six and Other Stories left me with a deep, deep sense of dread after I finished reading it. Highly recommended, such an underrated collection.

• josh-sematic

  today at 3:22 PM

  Not fiction but you might find this interesting: https://collapseos.org/why.html

• jrmg

  today at 2:55 PM

  I suspect it might be too ‘soft’ for a lot folks around here (sadly), but “Monk and Robot” is charming.

  In general, you should look into the ‘solarpunk’ genre, especially post-apocalyptic solarpunk.

• bshacklett

  today at 2:19 PM

  Not exactly what you're describing, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Second_After kinda fits the vibe. Warning: it's really depressing, but a good read if you're in the right head space for it.

  • _shantaram

    today at 2:32 PM

    Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank is another great book in a similar vein.

• rapnie

  today at 1:24 PM

  Besides published material, Cuba comes close. Kept frozen in time by eternal restrictive sanctions.

  • guestbest

    today at 5:54 PM

    You don’t think the country is mismanaged?

• tetris11

  today at 12:39 PM

  Book of Eli has vibes along those lines

Somewhat relevant: some of us have been using drawer-bound smartphones for web hosting.

https://far.computer

https://compost.party

The termux community are masters of creating useful servers with old phones.

This also solves alot of the security issues as your in a sandbox.

Love to see it! Feels like the sort of give-a-damn that past Google was more about, versus challenging to do at present Google.

> With Google’s support, [researchers at the University of California San Diego] plan to deploy a datacenter built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones

Ah.. well maybe success here will give internal folks some ammo for enabling more reuse of the mountain of Android (and Chromebook) devices.

A Pixel phone is a pretty neat computer. I tried a short project to turn one into a voice assistant node and then into a balcony camera to watch my plants etc. Realistically I should have rooted it and installed a full Linux etc. because you have to use the limited Google primitives through Termux to access Google’s very good voice model with its wake word detection. Stitching those things together is (was?) more annoying on a Termux session with open software.

And the balcony camera didn’t work out because I wanted it to be solar powered and the angles of sunshine available to me without active tracking don’t give me sufficient energy on a daily basis.

But the machine is still a good machine. I will perhaps return to one of these projects. It’s annoying how much power access dominates everything.

Anyway, this is a cool project!

You guys should check acurast.com . This is decentralized compute network with over 200,000 retired devices connected.

You can already run any workloads on it at a fraction of a price of traditional cloud services.

This is coming from the same Google that's recently restricted third-party AOSP source access to biannual releases, severely limited the scope of Pixel sources (basically just GPL now) and started concealing their change history, AND is currently pushing developer verification and Play Integrity on Android :D

Not sure if I should take this as a joke or a sign of an internal power struggle. If it's the former, there's still some catching up to do before you can match Samsung's "Upcycle", but you're on the right track.

Speaking as someone who has a cluster of four RPi Zero W’s mounted in an Ikea picture frame running as a Docker Swarm cluster, I LOVE this idea.

• cloud8421

  today at 11:57 AM

  That’s cool, do you have a write up about it?

I wanted to do this for like forever. So much computing just being tossed whenever I visit e-waste facilities. I was thinking that maybe AI can help automate the creation of a stripped down Linux that can be tailored for many phones and break some of the propietary blobs. We really need networking(ethernet?) and the CPU. Audio, accelerated GPU, cell, bluetooth etc can just be tossed. I was envisioning AI developed carrier boards that you could attach a phone motherboard to and it would help break out I/O and power. At this point it remains to be seen if AI can assist with this.

Sounds like a marketing focused and less technical perspective of: https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/

And who made the phones to retire? Google and other makers by closing firmware and bootloaders. And also by requiring more and more resources after each OS update and upgrade.

Cool concept, I hope it becomes fully realized, scaled, copied. Created a play prediction question to track that https://manifold.markets/MikeLinksvayer/by-eoy-2030-what-wil...

I love the take about it. But nowhere is mentioned how have they installed Linux on those boards and which kind of distribution. I would also run Linux on retired phones, just I can't because some of them have a locked bootloader and the unlocking method doesn't work anymore, because the producer has retired the tool

It’s counter intuitive to me that this is a net carbon win.

- Are these phone processors really as compute-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 hardware up is being used to house these. Is that really compute-power-per-embodied-carbon-footprint efficient than making a new server?

• Jaxan

  today at 5:45 PM

  Producing phones emits a lot of CO2 (or equivalents). It takes more energy to produce, than the amount of energy a phone uses in its typical life.

  But yeah, these are great questions which are not obvious at all and should be answered when proposing such a system.

I'm delighted to see at least someone is trying this. There are also millions of old laptops discarded every year, often with perfectly capable motherboards, but with minor issues outside of the compute (keyboards, screens, dead battery) which are just not economical to repair. Surely with the right software you can turn 10x 8GB i5 motherboards into something more than the sum of it's parts?

• valisvalis

  today at 4:59 PM

  Yeah, I think the intention matters here. There might even be a whole business to be created from this.

> This is generally driven by people’s desire for a new device, including for the functionalities provided by new models.

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".

Very weird that this is coming from Google, given that they made their phone platform specifically to not let you install your own operating system. And now, they're making it illegal to install custom apps too: https://keepandroidopen.org/

• gruez

  today at 2:07 PM

  >given that they made their phone platform specifically to not let you install your own operating system.

  ???

  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.

  • bshacklett

    today at 2:34 PM

    If they use anything that can be classified as a "digital lock" to enforce the policy, section 1201 of the DMCA comes into play. That includes potential criminal liability, resulting in fines and/or jail time as described by section 1204.

• jubilanti

  today at 2:11 PM

  You say that as if Google is a single hive mind with every team and vertical perfectly aligned like the Borg.

  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.

• surajrmal

  today at 2:12 PM

  There is nothing about Android as a platform that forbids installation of your own OS. That's a phone oem choice and the fact Pixel phones can be unlocked proves as much. In fact this is the reason this project is even possible.

> Prior to deployment, smartphones must be processed to remove all but the motherboard

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.

Ctrl+F PostmarketOS. No? No, apparently.

• Zambyte

  today at 12:59 PM

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516656

  This earlier comment referenced it :)

I liked Jennifer Switzer's junkyard computing paper and it's cool to see her still working this idea.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06870

So did they just make a cloud out of computers that can't run a current kernel? That seems like a pretty big caveat

Beowulf cluster time for old Pixels?

I've always wondered what that would be like. A fleet of 50 relatively modern flagship smartphones, wiped and retrofitted software wise to act as a homogeneous server, running ubuntu or centos or fedora, something like that.

in a weird way - this shows how much of a premium there's with cloud computing, while also showing how much computation power is in consumer devices.

Well, I really don’t like Google, but if they make this a thing, I’d switch to Android and put Graphene on it or whatever just so I could tie into this. This is an excellent idea.

EMMC in phones has a finite lifetime and dies after a few years of use. That it is not mentioned in the article tells me everything I need to know about its seriousness

> the mobile-oriented Android userspace must be replaced with a general-purpose Linux distro

c'mon Google, release that shit.

Is be more enthusiastic about this if one could remove the batteries. Dealing with spicy pillows is a pain

• nosioptar

  today at 2:21 PM

  Aside from bootloaders, this is the only thing stopping me from using old devices for cool stuff.

... carbon is fungible. Are they sure the effort of recycling them isn't higher than the effort of producing a single modern GPU?

If only the phones could run a real Linux, let us bring our normal payloads of tools & scripts!

Do many people really have a stockpile of working old phones?

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.

• pornel

  today at 12:18 PM

  There are recycling and trade-in programs that could collect compatible phones and pass them on in bulk.

• fer

  today at 12:39 PM

  I have Nexus 5, Xiaomi A1, Redmi Note 7, Samsung S7, and a Kindle Fire HDX, all running either LineageOS (Kindle) or PostmarketOS (the rest). PmOS ones run some not very demanding containers (scrapers) on k3s.

• jstanley

  today at 12:38 PM

  They're not useful as phones, because the battery, screen, radio, etc. are damaged; but they may still have a working CPU inside, which would be sufficient for this project.

• t-3

  today at 12:47 PM

  I have a drawer full of old phones with broken screens, obsolete chipsets, etc. I usually buy phones rather than get them through a contact plan with trade-ins though.

• nosioptar

  today at 2:25 PM

  I did before the switch to volte.

  I recycled them wheb carriers decided to block a bunch of phones.

• david_allison

  today at 1:26 PM

  I have a large amount, some are occasionally useful when debugging.

• jeffbee

  today at 1:04 PM

  The article mentions the Pixel Fold. I suspect Google possesses every Pixel Fold ever made.

Maps Camp Google 2007 -- to the assembled 400+ engineers and guests, at the podium. A calm and thoughtful pitch during the five minute talks "You at Google have a special responsibility, we all do, to make a closed loop industrial ecology with this hardware".. Later that month, bills unpaid, rent payments on credit, the blog EWasteInsights folds after two years.. Silicon Valley Bank has a another boozy party...

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