Currently automatic updates are an issue and remote management needs work.

What else am I missing?

"Let's host my own physical server. Virtualize different servers for different services: web, mail, owncloud storage, torrentbox, flac streaming service to mobile and web client. Let's run Cyanogenmod without Google services on my old 2012 Nexus 7! Surely K-9 can do the job just as well as Gmail! What else would I need a tablet for? OpenStreetMap wooo! My own Calendar instance! Stuff like that."

Spent days architecting the bloody server thing.. Looking into security, virtualization, database isolation, shit like that.

However, I am 30, making a career change, sick and tired of pushing someone else's agenda 8 hours a day. I want to build my own ideas and share it with people. Maybe make a living off of what I make. Build a farm. When not working or studying, I'd rather strike the earth and take care of my vegetable garden, play with the cat, hike with the wife. This helps me to have a more full experience.

Your time is precious. That is the only thing you will never get back. Read the book Walden instead. The only thing the writer truly treasured was his time. Throw in some taoist and buddhist literature as well, might help. Those will teach you not to care for other people's games (big data, small implication). Be more aware of the psychology of manipulation, triggers and getting you to sign up/pay/subscribe. Mastering your own mind is more important than keeping your mail from automated google scripts. Do you eat well? Do you sit all day? Do you know what's in your food, water, air? How are your bad habits, smoking, procrastination, drinking or onania problems going to be solved?

Not by not using Google service, I tell you. When you die, your privacy will be of no concern to you. How you live hold greater value.

My current proposal is as follows:

1. Care less. Not about security and privacy, but about Google following you. Pay more attention to what is keeping you from living A Better Life, however you define that. Do you have financial planning for retirement? Do you have a goal in life?

2. Have a trusted person or lawyer to follow set instructions on deleting all your online presence when you die. Have them burn your diaries if you keep any. Keep in mind, many literary people asked loved ones to do this, who then proceeded to publish their letters and unfinished work anyway. Maybe have two people for this, unknowing of each other's responsibilities.

3. Keep separate Google and Gmail accounts for your work life and your personal life. Employers should not be able to find you based on your work-related email address. Sometimes it's a hassle, but I manage them.

4. Disable what data tracking you can, and avoid using services for which there is a feasible alternative. For me, Drive, Maps and Keep are just way too comfy, and the alternatives are either poor, take time to set up properly or are another SaaS solution. Consider proper backups, not simply using external drives that fail or can be stolen along with your PC or laptop. Secure, off-site, automated, possibly offline solutions. Can you do that? Should you? What do you win? What is the return on investment here?

5. Also, if you wish, move to a country where data privacy laws are firm and governments to a large degree respect their citizens (Switzerland comes to mind).

Now I'd rather leave hosting to a someone dedicated to it who has internalized the latest state of things for all the relevant bits of software and is constantly keeping this knowledge in their brain. Set and forget self hosting can't work in the current environment we have where things require constant security updates and complex security hardening.

Ideally your phones could be the web servers, and a new class of apps could be created that run on your phone, acting as both client and server.

I don’t want it on my device. Battery, connectivity and uptime aren’t suited to hosting. But it should be something I can delegate to a service (or set of services) and only care about the hosting details of if I want to.

Problem is, every time I see anything on decentralised identity or hosting, it ends up as an unusable dogs breakfast. We’re not there yet, but it’s worth pondering as a possible future.

Play store needs to be split into provider and interface APIs, so you can add your own repos and still have it work with existing tools.

Remote management needs to be a thing for sure, installing apps is the hard part of that. WearOS does it amazingly, just connected to BT and the host play store does it, but you'd need the split app store to make that work well with open source third party repos.

Automatic updates would be solved by that, just deploy your app on a repo, and update via the play store or your interface app of choice.

Finally you'd have to solve the biggest problem with ANY self hosting as far as I'm concerned, how to handle certs and domains with zero manual IT work(Has to be truly zero, no chance it needs maintenance while you're on vacation).

I've been saying this for a while, we need pubkey-based domains like .onion URLs, but without the onion routing, so there's no dependence on a CA or anything that might be hard to do in a fully automated "Scan the QR and connect" context.

Or, more likely, Google gives you a service.yoursubdomain.google when you buy Google One, and routes stuff ngrok style for you, with lots of spying, because P2P hasn't been their thing so far. Perhaps one of the forks could do it though.

Without eliminating domains and certs, I'll continue mostly ignoring self hosting, I don't want any chance it goes wrong while I'm too busy to fix it, since there's no dedicated support staff, just me.

It would also solve the other half of remote admin, apps could just declare a web interface for admin that you access if you have the secret URL.

Then you'd need some systemd alternative to manage processes. You'd have to be able to say "Start this on boot, restart it on failure, and never clear it out of RAM".

On the hardware side, phones are already close to perfect. Keep the screen and NFC and Bluetooth, for QR based connections and the like, keep the battery as a UPS, but add more USB ports, Thread/Matter, and ditch or downgrade the cameras.

The filesystem probably needs to support snapshots, and Android should get a Full Backup and Restore Provider API to make it easier to back up everything, just the home folder, just one app, just the settings, just the data, etc, to your chosen provider, maybe even with hooks for apps to respond to import and export, so that the state of your app is totally portable and needs only a few clicks to restore from auto backup.

Finally, we need a cpanel-like VPS management tool to migrate your stuff to cloud hosted if you want, that can take backup files, and show you what's on the remote device's virtual screen(Again, so QR stuff works) or at least what's being displayed via some "Admin screen API" if you don't want to drag the full graphics API into it(But keeping graphics all the time seems like a good plan for standardization, and for kiosk type stuff).

And then finally, you'd probably want a some of the features from a normal-ish Linux userland, or as close as you could get, to make porting existing stuff easier, but even without that, I'd say the porting would be worth it.

(I self host everything except email and calendar -> Apple and Microsoft own me)

And you absolutely do have to hope.

I've been slowly moving everything to self hosted to reduce the pain if/when I'm ever randomly banned from Google or some other huge network and can't get it re-enabled.

The downside is that I'm now my own IT department and need to perpetually monitor these things.