My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server
68 comments
·June 18, 2025nancyminusone
behnamoh
This Apple fee is one of the most absurd things they do. Like, how is it even justified—does Apple really spend $99 on infra maintenance and server costs to host your app?
When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.
I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.
aerostable_slug
I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission. I'm not sure a hundred bucks is the right number, but it's not fair to say all they do is host the file.
neilv
> I think it's fair to also cover the fairly rigorous testing that occurs for each app store submission.
By "fairly rigorous", do you mean "fickle, random"?
rahimnathwani
You have to pay $99/year even if you only want to use the app on your own device.
You can only sideload for free if you are willing to reinstall every X days.
They don't need to test an app if you're not asking them to distribute it through their store.
bigyabai
"fair" would be letting me sideload if I didn't want to go through Apple's vetting. Their expensive review process is only required because they decide it's arbitrarily necessary and unavoidable.
notnmeyer
i’d guess it’s more to keep extremely low effort submissions out of the app store.
Gigachad
Which is not unreasonable for something listed in the App Store. It is unreasonable that you can’t sideload though.
rkagerer
This is why I switched to Android 10 years ago. Unfortunately the grass isn't looking much greener over there these days.
I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.
asimovfan
what is it that you "love" about Apple?
procinct
I believe you only have to pay to put your app on the App Store. I’ve made apps for my iPhone before and never had to pay.
mcpherrinm
It's the "for longer than a week" bit - Unless you have a paid developer account, you can only sign apps to sideload that last one week.
There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week.
The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an app) but is clearly intended to avoid being a way to sideload apps without the developer account "nearby".
tech234a
If you trust it, SideStore manages to do it on device by using a local VPN to make an on-device server appear to be an external device on the network.
sheepscreek
I’m not a 100% on this, but I believe you need to pay them to “sign” your app. For iOS, that means there is no way anyone else will be able to use your app unless they side-load it themselves (and we all know how cumbersome that is, Apple doesn’t want to make it easy).
notnmeyer
correct
slg
There is also the roughly $1k in costs for the solar and battery hardware even if we consider the iPhone itself free since it is so old.
HenryBemis
I was just checking the combo he is using [0] (River 2 Pro + 220W solar generator) and it's currently at USD 619. In the post, the author sums it at USD 780. I assume price dropped because of newer models, etc.
[0]: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/river-2-pro-portable-power-s...
slg
There were also $280 of other vague miscellaneous costs listed among the initial investments that I was including as part of that "roughly $1k"
nico_h
Also you can only run the compile-sign-deploy from a mac AFAIK.
dzhiurgis
EcoFlow batteries are pretty expensive too.
Also that's about 500kWh of power annually which averages to 50W. There is just no way iPhone uses that much.
winter_blue
The author has a mini PC plugged into the EcoFlow as well. That uses the bulk of the power.
neilv
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.
namuol
Interesting tech but there’s zero explanation of the actual application, so it’s all a little abstract.
jdon
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...
jkmcf
Tangentially, https://github.com/finnvoor/yap
A CLI for on-device speech transcription using Speech.framework on macOS 26
FlyingSnake
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.
tclancy
>We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking.
I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?
jerlam
For me, iPads (base model, non-Air/Pro) and iPhones seem to exist on opposite ends of the longevity spectrum. Never had an iPad last over 2-3 years without feeling sluggish and ready for an upgrade. Never had an iPhone since the 4 that felt sluggish when Apple stopped supporting it (5+ years).
criddell
My iPad is a 2018 iPad Pro and it still works great. It’s my most used computer by far. AFAIK, it’s still supported by Apple.
My phone is an iPhone 13 (2021) and I’ll probably upgrade in the next 24 months to get a better camera.
brailsafe
My iPad 3 is only unusable because anything beyond iOS 9 isn't installable, most of the like 5 Apps I did have installed on it didn't survive a "backup", and obvs nobody's going out of their way to support ancient platforms.
Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.
tech234a
As a counterexample, VLC surprisingly still supports iOS 9.0
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ideashower
I'm confused. What are you OCR'ing that requires a solution like this? What images are you processing?
ubercow13
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?
etra0
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.
xydac
Mine bailed out on a Baseband error due to which i am not even able to boot it anymore :(
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wing-_-nuts
I loved the 'it turns out I'm an indoor cat with outdoor aspirations'. I often joke I'm an 'avid indoorsman'
frereubu
You might like this song, The Outdoor Type by The Lemonheads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijlk0GTQbB4
yegle
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’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.