Why this question never gets a straight answer
Search this and you'll get listicles ranking proxy services rather than handsets, written by people who don't run phones. The few real discussions, mostly on BlackHatWorld rather than Reddit, trade model recommendations that flatly contradict each other. Which is what you'd expect if the model wasn't the deciding variable.
It isn't. We run 134 Android phones on real carrier SIMs and log every time one drops its connection. That's a view the listicles don't have, so here's what it's taught us, instead of another opinion.
What running them really teaches you
What matters isn't whether a phone is online right now, it's how often it drops and has to come back. Every reconnect is a window where your traffic fails. Measured that way the gap between handsets is far wider than any spec sheet explains, and it doesn't follow price. The steadiest phones we run are cheap current mid-rangers, and they comfortably out-last flagships a few years older. Paying more bought nothing.
Buying old to save money doesn't work either. The most dated handsets we run are the least dependable things we own, by a wide margin. Cheap and recent wins, cheap and ancient loses badly.
One trap worth naming, because it'll mislead you. A phone can look healthier on a live status board while dropping far more often. Short outages barely register in a snapshot, so a dashboard full of green dots tells you very little about whether a device is dependable. If you run your own phones, measure reconnects over time instead of trusting an "online now" percentage, including ours.
What really decides it, ranked
| Factor | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Battery-optimisation behaviour | Decisive | The biggest single cause of a phone quietly going offline. Aggressive power management suspends the background service after a few idle hours, and the device looks online while passing nothing. |
| Background-kill policy | Decisive | Some skins kill long-running foreground services under memory pressure whatever exemptions you've set. Whatever you run has to notice it died and start itself again. |
| Reboot survival | High | Phones reboot for OS updates, crashes and power cuts. If the proxy service doesn't come back on its own afterwards, every reboot turns into a site visit. |
| OEM permission model | High | Some skins won't take silent permission grants over ADB, so you can't fully script setup and have to tap through it on screen. It doesn't stop the phone working, it just multiplies the labour per device. |
| Carrier and band support | Medium | Decides where the phone can physically live and which carriers you can put in it. A handset that doesn't support your carrier's bands is a paperweight, however good the software is. |
| CPU, RAM, screen quality | Low | What everyone asks about, and what matters least. Proxying isn't compute-heavy. A mid-range phone from a few years back has plenty of headroom. |
Notice that the top four are all operating-system behaviour and the bottom one is the spec sheet. That inversion is the whole answer to the question.
The failure you'll hit
Far and away the most common real-world problem is a phone that reports itself online while passing no traffic. The device has gone into deep sleep and the OS has suspended the background service without tearing down the connection, so every dashboard says green and nothing works.
- Exempt the app from every power-saving feature the skin offers, not just the headline battery-optimisation toggle. Manufacturers ship several overlapping ones.
- Re-check exemptions after OS updates. Major updates frequently reset them, and the phone that ran for months quietly stops.
- Assume it will be killed anyway and build for recovery: a watchdog that notices and restarts, and a service that comes back on its own after a reboot.
- Keep egress on cellular. A phone that quietly falls back to Wi-Fi isn't a mobile proxy any more, even though it's still online and still serving traffic.
Buy in matched batches rather than collecting mixed models. One handset on one firmware means one set of quirks to solve, one provisioning routine, and spares that are genuinely interchangeable. Mixed fleets multiply the operational work without improving anything.
If you're choosing a phone to start with
Pick a cheap, plentiful, second-hand Android on bands your carrier uses, buy two so you've got a spare, and spend your attention on power management instead of specs. The step-by-step setup is in turn an old Android phone into a mobile proxy, and if you're weighing this up as a business rather than a single device, the economics are in how much operators make and build vs resell.
Frequently asked questions
What is the single best phone for a mobile proxy?
There isn't one, and anyone handing you a single model number is guessing or selling something. What we can tell you from running our own fleet is that the gap between the best and worst handsets is huge, far bigger than anything on a spec sheet explains. It comes down to how the operating system treats long-running background services, not the hardware. A phone that's been fine for months can start dropping out after an OS update changes power management.
Do I need a flagship or a new phone?
No, and our own experience argues against it. Proxying barely touches CPU or memory, so spec is close to irrelevant. In our fleet the current budget handsets are noticeably steadier than flagships a few years older. Cheap recent mid-rangers are the sensible economics: plentiful second-hand, and the money you save buys spares. Note the word recent though. Buying old to save money is a false economy, the most dated phones we run are the least dependable we own.
Why does my phone show online but pass no traffic?
Almost always battery optimisation. The OS has suspended the background service without dropping the connection, so the control channel looks alive while nothing routes. Exempt the app from every power-saving feature the skin offers, on Samsung that's "Never sleeping apps" and other skins call it something else, then check the exemption survived the next OS update because updates often reset it.
Does rooting help?
It can, for locking down power management and changing device-level network behaviour, but it's a lot of work per handset and it varies wildly by model and firmware. For most people it isn't the constraint worth attacking. Get power management and auto-restart right first, that fixes the large majority of real dropouts.
iPhone or Android?
Android, and it isn't close. iOS won't allow the kind of persistent background networking this needs, and you can't provision it the same way. Every practical self-hosted mobile proxy setup runs on Android.
Skip the handset problem entirely
Rent a dedicated phone we already run, or bring your own and let our software handle the watchdog, reboot recovery and rotation.