stf

It's not really. I've had a test bench with smartphones at work with open smartphone test farm and about 50% of them cracked their cases open after a year or two. It is not a joke. It really happens. None of them actually got to the point of exploding but it didn't exactly look "safe". Of course I replaced them when this happened. Sometimes it took a while because they were on a stand, we only controlled them remotely so it would take me cleaning the stand or something to notice something was off. Still, it served our support team really well during the pandemic. They could test wifi setups at the office with different android versions even when they were in a country that was on lockdown themselves. OpenSTF was great: https://github.com/openstf I think it's now been replaced by DeviceFarmer: https://github.com/DeviceFarmer/stf

The heat isn't too hard to deal with, there are solutions (including the weird ones like water cooling cases https://www.ebay.com/itm/175003613243 ). Simply adding airflow tends to get you pretty far by itself, even. Device test labs are a common-enough thing and handle running phones like servers at scale without too much difficulty. But there's more nasty lurking problems in this area, like that phones aren't designed to be continuously powered. They will naively try to keep the battery at or near 100% charge, which will destroy it relatively quickly, and not uncommonly in the "it's bulging and increasingly likely to burst into flames" variety. 2 years is considered a "decent run" for things like device test labs as a result (see eg the FAQ on https://github.com/DeviceFarmer/stf )