Back in 2009, anynone with a Nokia could have a personal website running on their own phone. Sadly this amazing piece of tech was never widely adopted. Today’s phone are far more powerful than those Nokias both in performance and battery backup and still we don’t see anyone running a server on their phone. Why?
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I think this was never implemented on phones because there’s no incentive for large corporations to work on something like this. In fact, it might be something they want to actively avoid in order for their walled gardens to flourish.
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Android phones can’t run a web server on port 80. This is something that has been raised previously with Google but under the name of security this is not allowed. I am not sure if this is possible on IPhone.
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A large percent of newer subscribers are on CG-NAT and IPv6 is not widely adopted.
I believe today’s phone can definitely handle a small personal website that has similar functionality like that of original Nokia web server. The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. The privilege of self hosting that early Internet users enjoyed was never given to the new Internet users. They joined Internet when their devices were already behind CG-NAT. The next billion websites can come from average phone users if only corporations and government agencies came together. All we need is IPv6 connectivity everywhere and phone operating systems optimized to run web servers.