Run Domino on a phone
Daniel Nashed – 7 October 2026 14:19:41
Run Domino on a phone
The idea of running Domino on a phone came up when I was looking for a new small environment, similar to a Raspberry Pi.
There is no Domino support for ARM yet, but I have been looking into the ARM platform for other types of applications for quite a while. For example, NGINX and containers in general work very well on ARM.
Most of my projects already work on ARM, and I have a couple of ARM-based production servers running today.
For smaller emergency environments, I was looking for an even smaller form factor. My first idea was a tablet. But then, during a discussion with ChatGPT, the Ubuntu Touch project came up.
Ubuntu Touch only supports a limited number of phone models because it needs to be specifically adapted to the hardware of each mobile device.
The phone we picked is particularly interesting and is currently available refurbished. I got mine this week:
https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/spacewar/
Getting Ubuntu Touch and Docker running
Switching the phone to Ubuntu Touch was the first adventure.
Once stage one was complete, I started looking into adding Docker. Installing additional system software on Ubuntu Touch can be challenging because the operating system itself is mostly read-only.
But Docker can be installed using Snap.
Once Docker was running and I had some native ARM containers up and running, another idea came up:
Why not run the x64/amd64 version of Domino in a container using emulation on the ARM phone?
The phone has eight CPU cores and 8 GB of RAM, which leaves plenty of resources for experimenting with amd64 emulation on ARM.
And that's where things started to get really interesting...
I’d continue from here with the actual emulation setup, then the first successful Domino startup, and finally a short section on performance and what this means in practice.
That gives the post a nice progression: phone → Ubuntu Touch → Docker/ARM → amd64 emulation → Domino.
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