Pi Network is sort of this controversial platform, but one that interests me. They claim to be a cryptocurrency network, "powered by phones", and already have 10 million+ users. One of the first suggested results when typing Pi Network is "Pi Network Scam" and one of the questions that people ask is, "Is the pi network legit?". This has in the very least made me a bit suspicious. This is true even w/ the Stanford PhDs on board.
I also don't like how their network has ads. However, that is a different story. The premise of what they wanted to build have intrigued me to an extent. It isn't really the idea of mining on lower power infrastructure or phones, but the idea of what you can do if all these phones are peers. This has peeked my interest.
Right now Pi is claiming to want to develop a developer platform, and even has a sandbox setup. This is where I think things could get interesting. My own startup is working on building a decentralized-internet SDK. My proposal for them is, "What kind of DAPPs your users can be building if they integrated my SDK?".
Currently, authentication on a network isn't impressive enough for a full scale DAPP development platform. However, if Pi wants to utilize my open source SDK for users to build distributed computing or offline-centric apps, their network could become something powerful. Pi can become another network that is on our "decentralization train", and what all these networks build would be interesting to watch.
That said, this is currently just a proposal and more or less an open letter to them. However, if they are interested, I think the capabilities across all these ranges of devices would be interesting to watch.