How I automated LinkedIn with my old phone

We all have at least one old phone that nobody uses anymore. A Galaxy something or other with a cracked screen protector. A phone that still works fine but hasn't been charged for so many months now. They just sit there, slowly becoming e-waste. Until you turned one into your personal LinkedIn automation agent.

That’s right. Just an old Android phone and an AI that does all the clicking, scrolling, posting, commenting stuff for me.

Let me explain. If you've ever tried to automate LinkedIn, you know the deal. Chrome extensions that inject scripts into the page. Cloud tools that log into your account from some random IP in Virginia. Dedicated SaaS platforms charging $99/month to send connection requests. and LinkedIn's crackdown has only gotten worse. People are getting accounts restricted left and right. The problem isn't the automation itself but how most tools do it. They're all browser-based hacks pretending to be you, and anti-bot software has gotten scary good at spotting them.

So I asked myself what if the automation happened on an actual phone, doing actual taps, like an actual human?

Here's what I did. I grabbed my old Android device from the drawer, installed the Droidrun APK, and connected it to Mobilerun. That's it. That was the setup. Mobilerun is a platform that lets you automate real Android devices with plain English. You literally tell it what to do and it does it on a real phone, with real taps, real scrolls, real keystrokes.

I told it to open LinkedIn, go to my feed, and start engaging with posts. Liking. Commenting thoughtful responses (not those cliche Great post bots). Sending connection requests to people in my niche. Checking messages. And because it's happening on a real device with a real screen, LinkedIn sees exactly what it expects: someone using the app normally on their phone. Because that's literally what's happening. The AI is just the one holding the phone.

What I Actually Automated:

Here's my daily LinkedIn workflow that now runs without me touching anything:

1. Morning engagement round: The agent opens LinkedIn, scrolls through my feed, likes relevant posts, and leaves actual comments. Not generic ones contextual comments based on what the post is about.
2. Connection requests: Targeted outreach to people in my industry. The agent visits profiles, reads their bio, and sends personalized connection requests.
3. Message replies: It checks my LinkedIn inbox and drafts responses. I review the important ones, but for the, thanks for connecting messages it handles it all.
4. Content interaction: When I post something, the agent monitors engagement and responds to comments throughout the day.

All running on a phone that was of no use two weeks ago.

Watch it in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVx_jL8PT4o

Why This Approach is Different:

Most LinkedIn automation tools work at the API or browser level. They're essentially puppeteering a web session. LinkedIn knows(trust me, you are like this far from getting banned). They track browser fingerprints, unusual session patterns, and IP mismatches. But a real phone running the real LinkedIn app? That's just... a phone. The touch events are real. The screen renders are real. The network requests come from a normal mobile connection. There's nothing to detect because there's nothing fake. And here's the kicker if you don't even have an old phone lying around, Mobilerun offers cloud-hosted real Android devices. Same concept, but you skip the hardware entirely.

The Results:

After two weeks of running this:

• Connection acceptance rate went up (personalized requests hit different)
• My posts got more early engagement because the agent was actively engaging with others' content (LinkedIn's algorithm rewards that)
• I reclaimed about 40 minutes per day I was spending on manual LinkedIn engagement
• No account warning so far. Because it is an actual device working for me like a real person.

Should You Do This?

Look, I'm not telling you to go full bot-mode on LinkedIn. The platform has rules, and mass-spamming connection requests is still a terrible idea whether a human or an AI does it. But thoughtful, measured automation? Engaging with content you'd engage with anyway, just without spending an hour doing it manually? That's not gaming the system. That's just being efficient.

And if you've got an old phone sitting in a drawer doing nothing... well, now you know what to do with it.

I talk about AI agents and agentic AI.

Get in touch with me on LinkedIn.