What to do with an old Android phone: five uses worth the effort

You have a phone sitting in a drawer. It boots, the screen is intact, and you replaced it because the battery stopped lasting the day or because something better came out. Selling it gets you very little. Binning it is a waste, and it's electronic waste on top of that.

Here's the trick: almost everything an old phone does badly stops mattering once it's plugged in and sitting still in one place. A battery that can't manage six hours is irrelevant if it never leaves the charger. Slowness is irrelevant if the phone only does one thing.

Five real uses, from least to most effort.

First: half an hour of preparation

This applies to all five. Don't skip it, especially the first part.

• Wipe it properly. Remove your Google account first (Settings → Accounts), then do the factory reset. Do it the other way round and the phone locks itself behind anti-theft protection — nobody gets past the welcome screen without your password.
• Update what you can, and reduce exposure. A phone that no longer gets security patches isn't where you want your banking or your email. These uses don't need either, but if your router offers a guest network, put it there rather than on the main one.
• Look after the battery. A phone plugged in day and night for months, on an ageing battery, can swell. The signs are visible: the back cover lifts, the screen separates from the frame. If that happens, stop using it. It helps a lot to take the case off — heat leaves through the back — leave it somewhere with airflow, and switch on "charge limit" or "battery protection" if your model has it: it charges to around 80-85% and stops.

1. A camera pointed at your house

The most obvious use. An IP camera app turns the phone into something you can check from another phone: the front door, the garage, the workshop, the dog that gets on the sofa the moment you leave.

It needs three things: a socket, WiFi, and a mount. A small desk tripod does it. So does an elastic band and a book.

Where it fails: at night it sees nothing. A phone has no infrared emitter, which is what lets a security camera see in the dark. Its field of view is also narrower than a purpose-built camera's, so mount it high and in a corner.

2. A permanent music player

Wired or over Bluetooth into a speaker, in the kitchen, the workshop, the garage. The point isn't sound quality — it's never hunting for your good phone when you want music, and never having a call cut the song off.

If it still has a headphone jack, better still: it plugs into any old hi-fi. Load local music onto it, leave a streaming app signed in, or use it as an internet radio.

3. A digital photo frame

A digital frame costs money. An old phone in a stand does the same job, probably with a better screen.

Slideshow apps can rotate through a shared album: the rest of the family uploads photos from wherever they are, and they appear on their own on the kitchen screen. Set the brightness low, keep the screen always on, done.

It's one of the few tech gifts that genuinely works for an older relative, precisely because there's nothing to operate.

4. Car satnav and dashcam

Download offline maps for your area — Google Maps and Organic Maps both allow it — and you have navigation that needs no SIM and no data. It updates on your home WiFi when you pull in. You also stop leaving your good phone baking on the windscreen and draining its battery on every trip.

Add a dashcam app and it records in a loop, overwriting the oldest footage.

One serious warning: heat. A phone in direct sun behind a windscreen in summer will shut itself down, and the battery pays for it. Put it in the glovebox when you park.

5. A camera that keeps an eye on someone

Same hardware as use 1, different job. If someone older in your family lives alone, that drawer phone can sit watching the hallway or the living room — not so you can watch, but so you get told if someone ends up on the floor.

The difference from an ordinary IP camera is where the image gets processed. If frames travel continuously to somebody else's data centre, the home has become a place observed from outside. With Velia, routine analysis happens inside the phone; live video travels end-to-end encrypted only when an authorised person opens it and is never recorded. With permission, one ephemeral image may also be processed for assisted setup or critical-alert context, without being stored.

That's what Velia does: an app that uses an Android phone you already own as a camera that detects falls with AI running on the phone itself, and alerts the family. Alerts are free forever.

Two numbers measured on a Galaxy S20+ watching for a full day, in case you're working out whether your phone can take it: battery temperature stayed between 29 and 30 °C, and with the room empty the standing workload is about 1% of one core. It isn't a punishing use.

And the uncomfortable part, which we also measured: at night, without light, it doesn't see. In a 540-minute test in a dark room it detected zero people, with everything working perfectly. So when the light drops below the threshold, the app stops saying it's watching and starts saying it's blind. A plug-in night light in the hallway fixes it — and makes the trip to the bathroom visible at 3am while it's at it.

Which phone suits which job

• Anything that switches on: photo frame, music player.
• Anything with stable WiFi: house camera, car satnav.
• Anything with some muscle: running AI on the phone itself asks for more. Check the minimum Android version and RAM the app states before you decide.
• If it won't boot, or the battery has swollen: don't use it. Take it to a recycling point or any electronics chain's take-back scheme. Batteries don't go in household waste.

A phone in a drawer is worth nothing. Plugged into a wall doing one job, it's worth considerably more than anyone would pay you for it.