People already do this with Android phones. There's a downside: the battery is going to bulge in no time if you keep the phone plugged in all the time.
There are some workarounds (open the phone, solder a power supply to the battery terminals, add a capacitor and a resistor for good measure) but you'd need quite a repairable phone to pull that off easily.
I've always liked that demo of some person running a tiny ARM k8s cluster on his old Oneplus 1, but I'm not sure if I'd like to put the effort in to make it actually be usable in the long term. Still, the above-average transcoding abilities of pretty much every mobile SoC of the last decade and a half could be an interesting addition to a small home lab.
There are some workarounds (open the phone, solder a power supply to the battery terminals, add a capacitor and a resistor for good measure) but you'd need quite a repairable phone to pull that off easily.
I've always liked that demo of some person running a tiny ARM k8s cluster on his old Oneplus 1, but I'm not sure if I'd like to put the effort in to make it actually be usable in the long term. Still, the above-average transcoding abilities of pretty much every mobile SoC of the last decade and a half could be an interesting addition to a small home lab.