I wanted my PythonAnywhere scrapers to ping my Termux phone when something interesting happened. Every solution I found was overkill — Firebase, Redis, MQTT. So I built a minimal alternative in ~100 lines of Flask.

How it works: - Any script POSTs a job ("intent") to a Flask server - Workers anywhere poll for jobs matching their goal - Atomic SQLite lock prevents race conditions - 60s visibility timeout auto-requeues crashed workers - API key auth

The interesting part is the architecture — workers poll outbound, so they work behind firewalls with no open ports. A Raspberry Pi in your home lab can execute jobs posted from a cloud server with zero Ngrok.

After posting publicly, people stress-tested the open endpoint. Added API key auth and hardened it based on real feedback.

GitHub: https://github.com/dsecurity49/Intent-Bus Dev.to writeup: https://dev.to/d_security/how-i-control-my-android-phone-fro...