I still needed to put the internet server somewhere in-between. In theory, I could ask the tenant association to let me co-locate a Raspberry Pi in the building's "comms room" (and I still might, if I ever decide to move...), but I decided on providing that service from my own apartment - and I'm dogfooding my own solution so I know how well it works and can react quickly if it goes down.

The original Android app to control apartments expects an username and a password. I implemented a simple proxy service on my RPi which everyone would access where the username denotes the significant digits of the internal network's IP for that apartment (allowing the proxy to know where to forward the HTTP request to) and the password is generated on first run of the python service inside the Android app - the service will expect the password as part of the HTTP request headers or it would discard the request.

As for the Android app that would provide this python service, I just added it on top of the original app I developed! A new option was added to its only screen to enable/disable remote control and when enabled, show the unique autogenerated password needed. (See the screenshot on the project's front page.)

The best part is, the whole solution is to just install the app on the tablet - the original one or a better replacement (on which of course the original tools that root it instantly and make it faster and reveal the WiFi password are not available or even necessary - only the remote control service option is shown there) - and no hardware installation is needed.

Also, no changes to the smart apartment or the building's network infrastructure are needed and it is thus a "clean" solution that generates just a bit more traffic on the internal LAN (and far far less than each MJPEG webcam connection for the IP doorbells :P).

I'm proud to say that as of 2024, 29/128 (or almost a quarter) of apartments are using my remote control solution. Some of the neighbors reached out and thanked me for it, but far from the 29 I can detect using nmap -p5000 :) - that means that the Quick start guide PDF (also shown on this Hackaday.io project's front page) I sent out to spread awareness of how easy it is even for non-power users works well. But that's okay, I'm most satisfied when I see I was able to provide a free solution that greatly improves the usability of the smart apartment systems. And I made some fine new acquaintances in the process, too!