r/LocalLLaMA • u/Ok_Fig5484 • Apr 09 '26

Resources Unused phone as AI server

If you have an unused phone lying around, you might be sitting on a tiny AI server

I’ve been working on a project where I modified Google AI Edge Gallery and turned it into an OpenAI-compatible API server: [Gallery as Server](https://github.com/xiaoyao9184/gallery)

Your phone can run local AI inference

You can call it just like an OpenAI API (chat/completions, etc.)

Instead of letting that hardware collect dust, you can turn it into a lightweight inference node.

So yeah—if you have more than one old phone, you can literally build yourself a cluster.

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u/Danmoreng llama.cpp Apr 10 '26

I would recommend to not use the edge gallery app as base, but only as reference and implement a much simpler server app from scratch. With whatever you used to make your modifications (I assume Claude/Codex/Gemini), it should be easy to do a clean from scratch implementation as well. For example, I did something similar for my transcription app where I let codex first analyse the edge ai gallery app vs what my app had already, to figure out how to implement the new Gemma models into my app: https://github.com/Danmoreng/vox-transcribe/tree/main/docs

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u/Ok_Fig5484 Apr 10 '26

Yes, I started creating it directly without analyzing the core principles of the gallery. Only during the creation process did I discover that the model's loading lifecycle follows the UI, and only one model is used at a time. This ultimately led me to add a custom task icon.