I agree not having micro SD cards is pretty frustrating. The way I have worked around it is to “self-host” the things that take up lots of storage space on a separate PC, and connect to that with my phone when I want to access it.

For example, instead of loading a bunch of movies onto my phone, all my movies/tv are on my plex server. When I want to watch something I just open the Plex app and go. The videos don’t take up any space on my phone (unless i will be out of service, then I can download them via the app for offline viewing).

I do the same thing for music, pictures, and other things. A benefit of this is all my stuff is accessible from all my devices (phone, tablet/pc/laptop/tv) without me having to manually load it on each device.

It takes work to get setup, and it’s important to make sure you have good data backup practices incase you have drives that fail. But once you have it setup it’s quite liberating not having to rely on all the BS cloud services that big tech tries to sell us.

While I would still prefer to have a micro sd card slot, this setup makes me miss them less.

I’ve been happy with racknerd. They usually run specials that are pretty reasonable: https://www.racknerd.com/NewYear/

I did have one rather long outage of about 48 hours once. The host running my VPS had a nic fail. They got it fixed and it’s been solid ever since.

The official framework mainboard 3d printed case uses a compliant mechanism to push the power button, you can take at look at the open source STL files to see how they designed it for inspiration/reference.

https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13/tree/main/Mainboard/Printable Case

I do something similar with opnsense and policy based routing. opnsense is acting as both a VPN client and server. The client interface connects out to a commercial VPN, and the server interface listens for incoming connections. Based on what I I want to accomplish I setup firewall rules that use policy based routing to route incoming VPN traffic where it needs to go.

Regarding split tunnel on the client, the Android wireguard app has the option to specify what traffic uses the tunnel based on the application