KEY TAKEAWAYS

You can easily turn an old Android phone into a basic NAS for sharing data among your devices.

MiXplorer allows you to host servers on your Android phone, enabling easy file transfers and backup.

For more advanced NAS capabilities, consider rooting your phone and using Docker to deploy containers.

If you're a tech enthusiast like me, chances are you have an old phone or two lying around unused. While it's not necessarily the best use for it, you can definitely take one of those older devices and use it as a rudimentary NAS for sharing data across all your devices. I recently undertook the very basic project of hosting a media server on an old Android smartphone, and it's really easy for you to do as well.

On top of that, if you really want to take things a step further, you can root an old Android phone and set up Docker on it. From there, you can host normal applications that you would on any other NAS and deploy them on your network, including running things like Pi-hole or Jellyfin. We're making just a NAS out of an Android phone, but I'll likely look to undertake a project that takes things further in the future.