Does this work with mobile hotspots?

[SuperCowProducts]

This is likely to be a silly question, but I would love to use VNC over USB network connection to access my Pi with an Android device, and perhaps this will let me use the Pi's hostname instead of that static ip address.

[gitbls]

No such thing as a silly question!

Let's make sure that we understand the topology first. Here's what I think would likely work:

+------+             + ----------+               +-----------+
|    Pi    |---USB---|  Android  |---(W)LAN------|    ndm    |
+------+             +-----------+               +-----------+

In other words, you need a Linux host on your LAN on which you can run ndm. I doubt very much that ndm would run on Android.

I can't say for certain that this would work with ndm using dnsmasq, but I know for a fact that it will work with ndm using isc-dhcp-server. On my personal LAN I use ndm with isc-dhcp-server and have off-lan IP addresses defined, so quite confident that this would work.

Does this help?

[SuperCowProducts]

I see, looks like i need to have ndm installed on Android, unless I can somehow get the Pi to host the network (but then the phone would need to vridge its Internet access anyway to the Pi) so it's best to stay with static ip for now,.but thanks for the insight! I just find it annoying that mDNS works.perfectly on my router but not on my phone hotspot lol, which forces me tu configure static ip for the usb0 interface

[gitbls]

I don't understand your use case completely, but you can certainly have ndm on the Pi and tether the phone to the pi. I doubt that ndm would install, or if it could be installed, would be very easy to work with, on an Android device.