If I was building it to be 'local only' I would run the inference on a remote host in my house.

Having a microcontroller in the phone is nice because it is WAY less likely to break. I love being able to flash a simple firmware/change things would fighting it too much.

Oh! Also I do all the 'WebRTC/AI dev' in the browser. When I get it working how I like, then do I switch over to doing the microcontroller stuff.