Hello,

I'm a BOINC user that crunch several WU on various biological and medical projects. I have an Android 8.1 phone with 8 ARM Cortex-A53 cores with BOINC 7.14.1 (the .3 just crash).

The question is: what i have to do with it? A part World Community Grid, that in this period of time its not sending WU on Android, the other biological and medical projects are basically dead from months on Android. Rosetta? Dead. Other projects like this on Android? Don't even exist. Others like LHC? Dead. What remains? Einstein Home, Asteroids and other phisics/astronomical projects.

I can understand its everything about volunteers, development too, but there is an huge horse power of users on Android availaible, huge amount of TeraFlops that cant be utilized.

You have to look at the situation from a different direction:
Just because there's thousands of android phones around, it doesn't mean that people have to write science apps for them.

Most scientists are more familiar with the main stream computers, Mac's, Windows, and Linux.

And on top of what Les said, with each Android version things seem to change. Making it that projects science apps that worked perfectly for one or more Android versions all of a sudden no longer work. Or require that the bitness of the Android OS is the same as the CPU. Or need to be anything lower than Android 10, as although BOINC will run on that none of the project science apps that are still out there will. And as long as the projects don't release new apps for it, that won't be fixed.

---

I run an android cluster of currently 7 quadcore ARM units, and they get regular jobs.
Sometimes you can't be too picky, so I got about a good 15 projects that still send jobs on Android.
Aside from the ones that the Android client offers you, some projects might support ARM chipsets, that aren't shown in the list.
While I prefer to crunch for medical science, the reality is that even more modern (2 year old) phones, running Android 9, are just WAY too slow to do any kind of crunching jobs for the medical field.
To put this into perspective, a single mid range to high end GPU, is between 1000-2000x faster than an android phone.
Any newer phones do offer a significant bump in performance (Snapdragon 800 series and above), but most of them run Android 10; which is incompatible with Boinc.

If you're looking for efficiency, and yet cost effectiveness; I would seriously recommend to get a GTX 1050 or better, and crunch on that.
Preferably faster.
Because of the large shift in GPUs in the latest years, Android/ARM crunching will become less and less supported, and CPU crunching will improve, but the gap between CPU and GPU will continue to enlarge.
This meaning, if you want to crunch efficiently, you should consider a device with a dedicated graphics card that has at least 1024 shaders or cores running at ~2Ghz.
That means that 5 year old GPUs (that are about 200-400x faster than a cellphone) soon will not be fast enough to make a difference either.