Well, if you were really doing things in a fully "Androidish" way, you wouldn't just be straight porting PHP into an APK. You'd probably have a DatabaseProvide

Well, if you were really doing things in a fully "Androidish" way, you wouldn't just be straight porting PHP into an APK. You'd probably have a DatabaseProvider interface that your MySQL would implement, that would have all the stuff to auto-configure that interaction, and the SQL app would probably include its own backups and related admin stuff. If you were really going all the way, PHP and nginx probably wouldn't be a thing, you'd just be writing apps in straight Dart and putting your content as markdown files or something, to stay consistent and not add any extra layers of frameworks that aren't closely managed by the OS. But yeah, I agree, if you just straight ported existing architecture to Android you probably wouldn't get much benefit.