4 ms·
It's doable, but I believe a bunch of old phones will come out cheaper (including on electricity cost) and more reliable (being proper devices in the eyes of ad
by bserge 6y ago
It's doable, but I believe a bunch of old phones will come out cheaper (including on electricity cost) and more reliable (being proper devices in the eyes of ad networks, and having fewer crashes).
A 4 core i7 CPU + 32GB of RAM will run 4-8 Android machines, maybe a couple more. You can get 10 Android phones for ~$700.
- saddestcatever 6y agoTrue. I think the economics of how cheap smartphones have gotten is shocking. Especially since you can acquire "barely working" phones. Broken camera? Not a problem. Broken audio jack? No worries. Cracked screen? Meh. No battery life? Doesn't matter one bit. I imagine it's pretty easy to acquire hundreds of barely working phone for cheap if you don't care about using them as a traditional mobile device.
- Scoundreller 6y agoOr buy working devices and harvest the unneeded parts for resale. Can buy a used MacBook Air, sell the lcd assembly and keyboard/trackpad and already recover a big chunk of the cost. (If you needed an Apple device).
- banana_giraffe 6y agoAnd once you start looking to acquire hundreds of phones, you can buy a lot of old phones on ebay or the like for something like $1 a phone or less. Most probably won't work, but at scale, you'll end up with enough that are good enough for something like a click farm.
- ac29 6y agoWhy would an emulated phone need 4-8GB of RAM? A $70 phone probably only has 1 or 2 GB.
- bserge 6y agoWorst case scenario overhead. Aka my normal situation, because I'm too lazy to use solutions better than Bluestacks on Windows :D
- gruez 6y ago>A 4 core i7 CPU What year do you live in? These days even i3s come with 4 cores.
- bserge 6y ago2014, the last year Intel made any good improvements to their ancient architecture. Just ignore the "i7" part if it confuses you. I've not had a desktop in over a decade, so I'm talking about mobile chips 90% of the time.