Soon you'll also be able to do speech to text locally, as Apple is adding a SpeechAnalyzer API [0] which is apparently faster than whisper [1].

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/277/

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api...

  A CLI for on-device speech transcription using Speech.framework on macOS 26 

I love projects like this, doing things because you can. Especially low power, off-grid projects.

However I did not love the writing style of this article. Lots of repetition. Asking questions to stress a funny point. Lots of repetition.

I don't mean to sound like a jerk, even though I've succeeded at it. The author is cool, what they did is just as cool.

I see your fruitPhone 8 and raise my Motorola MB525 'Defy', Motorola MB526 'Defy+' and Samsung J3 which are in use as Wifi-enabled trailer camera. The phones provide a Wifi hotspot through which the camera's images are accessed. Hook up the trailer, connect to the Wifi network and voila, you can see what's happening in the trailer behind you. The oldest device in this list is from 2010, all of them run either Cyanogenmod (MB525 and MB526) or its successor LineageOS (J3). I replaced the batteries in the Motorola's, the J3 runs on its original battery. Oh, all of them run without a screen since that is not visible anyway and was broken in 2 of the 3. Android runs just fine without a screen and using the things this way takes a little less power.

I'm confused. What are you OCR'ing that requires a solution like this? What images are you processing?

I loved the 'it turns out I'm an indoor cat with outdoor aspirations'. I often joke I'm an 'avid indoorsman'

Maybe i'm missing something. Where are these thousands of users coming from? is this some service you offer?

Wonderful story!

We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking.

I have a similar story wherein I repurposed my ancient OG iPhone SE and gave it a new life.

https://samkhawase.com/blog/dumb-smartphone/

HomePods perform real-time vision processing on multiple camera streams for HomeKit. However, the primary quality challenge lies in the video quality of HomeKit-enabled doorbell cameras that can consistently stream to Wi-Fi. For instance, my doorbell operates on 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, resulting in highly compressed video streams. This compression likely impacts the results.

In my browser the ads cover the actual content.

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

>I’m saving approximately $84-120 CAD annually.

I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.

I wonder if someone will make a LLM farm from older (probably not too old) iPhones using Apple's new foundation models. I know they won't hold a candle to SOTA models, they are much smaller for one, but when they announced API access that's the first thing I thought of, a sort of "folding @ home" but routing queries to a phone and spitting back the results.

It's silly and probably makes no sense at all based on how weak the model will probably be but it's a fun thing to think about.

This reminded me of the guy that built a meme database using iPhone's OCR as well [1].

I find incredible the idea of giving these devices another life. I wonder how hard is to host a sort-of vps on an abandoned android phone these days... I guess as long as you can put ethernet + docker you'd have a very capable device.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315782

I have an ancient ipad that is still functional but stuck on iOS 9. Xcode doesn't let you target that version anymore. Is it still possible to compile an ipa for devices out of support?

Interesting tech but there’s zero explanation of the actual application, so it’s all a little abstract.

> Welcome to my corner of the internet! I’m Hemant, a Senior Software Engineer based in Canada . I’m passionate about cloud computing, DevOps, and building robust distributed systems.

Somehow you're also passionate about selling user data to hundreds of data brokers with no easy way to opt-out

This still requires a mini PC to bridge the API call and the iOS app.

I wonder if the new Android 16 terminal app would allow combining both.

I think this wouldn't work with any iPhone that's on a version of iOS new enough to have the 'feature' where it automatically restarts after a few days without being used?

Nice hacker effort and writeup, but I want to comment on a general HN pattern of what tech people promote implicitly with hacker network effects...

For every HN blog post of "I accomplished ___ despite a hacker-hostile platform, and now you can use what I built, and be hopelessly tied to the platform"... Baby Jesus Linus sheds a tear.

In this case, it's a bit odd, since the writer has an entire section, "Why This Actually Matters", of unusually good hacker and social values.

The privacy obsession and the fact he never mentions what kind of images the service is processing or what they’re for just kinda gives me the creeps, especially for the amount of requests he gets. There is a non-zero chance this is for illicit purposes.

this is so cool! Is it possible to boot linux on an old iphone?

Mine bailed out on a Baseband error due to which i am not even able to boot it anymore :(