[rektide]

I like the idea! There's some IP webcam apps. For some simpler needs, there's the Guardian Project's Haven[1].

Alas though, you'll still be stuck with a device that only lasts 3 years before it's insecure. I'm in the minority, but personally I'd rather a more open ended & flexible system like Linux, with more small-pieces-loosely-coupled possibilities in front of me, where-as with Android I'm going to have 2 or 3 different apps with pretty fixed/limited capabilities that I'll never be able to improve or adjust.

In some ways, the web is kind of the possible remedy here. If the phone runs a webpage that accesses the camera & webrtc & does the things, that'd kind of be ideal, because it's insta-deployable to any vaguely general-purpose hardware. Developing the webrtc chops though to be able to make use of this well though, that's a totally separate conversation.

[1] https://guardianproject.info/apps/org.havenapp.main/

[maven29]

There are phones that do run things like postmarketOS which aims to maximize as much mainline linux as possible. Some well-supported devices are pretty cheap on the secondary market, and for this use-case, things like broken screen etc do not matter in the least.

You'd still have binary blobs of HAL for some peripherals but that's not different from raspberry pi.