A whole host of reasons:

- Battery life. One of the main reasons your phone lasts as long as it does is because it severely restricts the ability to run always-on things. A phone of course can run an email server, but the battery life will immediately tank to the point where the device becomes largely unusable for its original purpose.

- Phones make extremely poor servers because connectivity is intermittent. This is fine for software that's 100% local, but a lot of the most useful software needs to talk to the internet - or more importantly, has to allow the internet to talk to it. Imagine losing an email because you walked into the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP server tried to connect to it.

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saidinesh5 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Battery life Would it be any more battery life consuming than having an always on connection for push notifications? I used to have a local http/ftp file server running on my Nokia N9/N900 and even on my early Android phones back in the day. I used to still get an all day battery life.

> Imagine losing an email because you walked into the subway and your phone was unreachable the moment an SMTP server tried to connect to it.

Dont SMTP servers already retry a few times before giving up? Plus it is not like you're using the phone to host content for the whole of the internet. It would be just for your close circle usually.

I am not saying phones make the perfect servers for all kind of applications but for certain kind of workflows... I think Phones are pretty good. Our network infrastructure (NAT, firewalls etc... limited data plans etc..) is the main headache for most of these use cases. But the network infrastructure is a problem even for our laptops, home computers etc..

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xnx 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Right, but you can leave a spare phone plugged in and connected to wifi just like a laptop.

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the_snooze 5 days ago | parent [-]

The point is that while phones are able to do what you suggest, they're not fit for purpose. A phone shouldn't be used as a long-term server because it turns into a fire hazard as the battery degrades. And you can't just remove the battery because most phones won't even power on without a battery (even when plugged in).

At that point, you're better off going with some N100 mini-PC or such. But that's not a phone.

	▲	potatolicious 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yep, at that point we've circled back to the original years-long conversation about home servers, except now instead of a cheap mini-PC it's a phone. The distinction isn't meaningful. And I'll remind folks that we've been talking about the power of people owning their own servers in their homes for decades, and yet the vast vast vast vast majority of users aren't doing it.