Homedroid turns the phone in your drawer into a media server, a NAS, a photo backup, a torrent box, a web host and a private AI, all run from one app and managed from a sleek web dashboard. One APK. No root. No Linux skills needed.
That phone has an 8-core CPU, a hardware video encoder, gigabytes of RAM, Wi-Fi and a built-in battery backup. It deserves better than a drawer. Everything below is a real recording of Homedroid running.
Live CPU, temperature, network, battery, memory and storage, plus every service with its logs and a restart button. It works offline and on your phone too.
MicroSD cards and USB drives show up next to the phone's own storage. Stream videos in the browser, drag in whole folders, download folders as zip, or mount it all over SFTP.
sshfs, rclone, WinSCP, FinderYour movies and shows on every TV, laptop and phone. Homedroid routes Jellyfin's hardware encoding to Android's MediaCodec, so the dedicated video hardware does the heavy lifting while the CPU stays cool.
Shown: Sintel © Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0.
Alpine Linux runs inside the app. Open a terminal in the browser or SSH in, install packages with apk, and grab a torrent with one command.
torrent 'magnet:?…' from anywherellama.cpp, built for Android, runs Qwen, Llama and Gemma models on the phone's GPU or CPU, whichever its own benchmark finds faster. Your other apps can use it through an OpenAI-compatible API.
Point it at a repository and Homedroid detects Node.js, Python or a static site, builds it and serves it. It checks the branch every 5 minutes and keeps the old version running if a build fails.
Pair phones with a 6-digit code over mutual TLS. Manage any of them from one dashboard, see every camera on one page, and move apps, with their data, to whichever phone has room.
:8096:2283:8081:8123:8090/v1dashboard:8022:8080tunneltailnet:8801 mTLSDNS :1053dashboard/api/wolThe phone app, the dashboard, an SD card, Linux in the browser, Jellyfin, on-phone AI, a GitHub deployment and two phones working as one. No cuts and no mock-ups, just the app running.
Can't play it here? Download the MP4 (13 MB). Made by Sudipta Goswami.
Android apps can't run servers the usual way: no root, no Docker, no access to the video hardware from Linux. Here's how Homedroid gets around all three.
Since Android 10, an app may only run programs that shipped inside its APK. So SSH, Caddy, Tailscale and FFmpeg are compiled for Android and packed in as lib*.so files, which Android happily unpacks and runs.
Everything else lives in Alpine Linux under proot, which translates system calls so Linux software believes it has a normal machine, while it's really inside the app's private folder.
# what Android sees lib/arm64/libsshd.so lib/arm64/libcaddy.so # what you see $ alpine localhost:~# apk add htop
Docker needs kernel features no app can touch. But an image is just layers of tarballs. Homedroid pulls them from Docker Hub or ghcr.io itself, checks every layer's checksum and stacks them the way Docker would.
Hard links (forbidden in app storage) become copies; absolute symlinks get rewritten. That's how Immich and PostgreSQL run from their official images, on a phone.
# ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server manifest → linux/arm64 layers → sha256 checked rootfs → runs under proot
The phone's encoder is only reachable through Android's MediaCodec, which a Linux FFmpeg can't use. So Homedroid builds an Android FFmpeg with MediaCodec and quietly swaps it in.
Jellyfin asks for V4L2 hardware encoding; a tiny shim hands that job to MediaCodec and everything else to Jellyfin's own FFmpeg. Jellyfin never knows it's on a phone.
jellyfin → h264_v4l2m2m shim → h264_mediacodec # encoded by the phone's video chip
And a handful of small, documented patches to proot and FFmpeg make the rest of Linux feel at home on Android. Read the details →
Grab it from GitHub Releases (arm64 fits almost every phone) and open it.
One tap. The app shows the dashboard address and its password.
Allow background running in Battery settings; the app shows you how.
Open the dashboard from your laptop and install Jellyfin, Immich and more.
Homedroid is free, GPL-licensed and young. The best thing you can do is try it on your phone and tell us how it went. Every phone report, bug and idea makes it better for the next person.