During my research on what to do with an old smartphone, I stumbled over the following project. TeleFrame is a fully fletched digital photo & video frame software running on any kind of server.
But aren't digital photo frames something for grandmas? Why would I put this to my student apartment?
The clou here: You can feed it with content using the popular Telegram Messenger.
The initial joy dropped quite abruptly when I realised that the software would require the Raspberry Pi to have some kind of screen connected to it. My Raspberry Pi however was setup to run in a headless environment (without any screen connected, using Raspbian Lite (the stripped down version without GUI / Window server)).
So I decided to ask the community on whether they have an Idea on that
Using old android phone as client · Issue #131 · LukeSkywalker92/TeleFrame
Luckily, a user proposed using his repository which contains a web-server add-on for TeleFrame that mirrors the output from the rendered GUI from the Pi to an interactive website.
With the Webserver plugin in place, I still needed to get a screen connected to the Pi.
As a quick alternative for testing I tried using a VNC server which basically creates a remote desktop session with graphical environment. Suddenly, the Pi had an external screen (virtual screen tunnelled to my computer) and I managed to start the server which magically brought up the desired interface.
With the interface running and TeleFrame-webRemote installed, the interface also appeared on Port 3000 and I was finally able to access the interface on my phone.