CMF Phone 1 repurposed as a home server running Termux
Original: My server is a phone now
Why This Matters
Demonstrates a cost-effective pattern for home server infrastructure using consumer Android hardware and Termux.
A developer replaced a Hetzner VPS with a CMF Phone 1 (8-core ARM, 8 GB RAM, 128 GB storage) running personal infrastructure via Termux on stock Android, after a failed postmarketOS attempt left the device temporarily bricked.
The author had been running personal web apps — including a remote browser called Surf, Caddy, and a finance tracker — on a Hetzner VPS, but found that dedicated CPU plans needed to support Chrome were too costly. Rather than buy new hardware (noting DRAM prices as prohibitive), they repurposed an already-owned CMF Phone 1. The phone offers 8 ARM cores, 8 GB RAM, 128 GB flash, Wi-Fi 6, a 5G modem, and a built-in battery. An initial attempt to flash postmarketOS failed: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and hardware acceleration were listed as broken on the device page, and the phone ended up showing only a black screen. Recovering stock Nothing OS required a Windows QEMU instance for USB passthrough and MediaTek drivers before a physical Windows machine could restore factory images. The author concluded that Android's existing drivers for all hardware components were too valuable to discard. The second approach kept stock Android and used Termux as the host environment, providing OpenSSH, runit, Caddy, Cloudflared, and standard Unix tooling. Termux:Boot handles supervisor and SSH startup after reboots, and Tailscale assigns the phone a stable private address on the tailnet. Today the phone runs Surf (with a managed Chrome instance), a personal finance tracker, a screen-sharing service, and several smaller web apps — all surviving reboots and deploying from Git.