Hello everybody.

Before anybody asks, no I don't want to control someone else's phone without them knowing!

The scenario here is a lot more bizarre and oddly interesting.

My friend recently decided that they hate everybody so they moved to a small fisherman's hut on a lake. There is no phone signal there at all. There is no telephone line either so basically its impossible to communicate with the world.

However, interestingly, one day while out on a boat in the lake, suddenly my phone beeped and I received a lot of notifications, and after some investigating we found that there actually is 4G signal about 20 meters out onto the lake. I have no idea why. Maybe the water makes a difference, I don't know, but on the shore there is NOTHING, on the lake there is 3 bars and the connection is quiet good!

So long story short, i was there one Saturday and my friend said MAKE ME SOME INTERNET NOW. I know you can buy 4g boosters but they are expensive and take weeks to arrive from Ali. Also you can get GSM dongles that have wifi, but I didn't have one. And the guy wanted the internet to work like NOW, today, with whatever junk we could buy today.

On the way there, there was a junk yard for boats, and they had some old 1990s solar powered warning buoys which were too old and thrown away. You know the kinds that float in the water and flash at night so boats don't crash into things. So we bought one, replaced the 2x lead-acid batteries inside it with an old car battery, took out the light bulb and radio warning transmitter and connected a 12v USB charger, and put an old Huawei android phone from like 10 years ago inside the glass thing where the lamp used to be. Believe it or not, this piece of shit actually works. The android phone floats inside the buoy out on the water, the 1990s solar panel still works enough to charge the car battery so the phone works all the time, the phone connects to 4g and has wifi-Hotspot turned on. On the shore there is a wifi booster that can just about connect to the phone from 20 meters away, and that boosts the wifi to the whole house.

This was only supposed to be a fix for a week or so until he can buy a proper 4g booster, but so far it's been working for about 8 months!! Somehow, the system works. It survived a whole winter without any problems.

This got me thinking tho. Is there any way to remote-control this phone? Just for various maintenance like checking the battery level, checking the 4g signal level etc etc. Right now the only way to check it is to physically get in a boat and go out there.

I actually don't know much about this at all, and I did some research and so far the only info I can find is to never EVER use team viewer because apparently they are a really shit company, they will cancel your free non-commercial license because they are greedy and want money etc etc etc.

So, does anybody know any good alternatives? Are there any free open-source apps that do this without buying a license etc etc?

I know the correct solution will be to just buy a normal 4g booster already, but I kind of want to see how long this system made out of Junk will work!