Why is it possible to brick a phone?

[DWR_31]

That's new and interesting information to me. I am sure you know what you are talking about. But look at the error message from Quickpic developers that I put in another thread:
http://forums.androidcentral.com/showthread.php?t=435653
(First post in the thread.)
They really claim they are helpless!

You should search the AndroidCentral.com articles that deal with sdcard and 4.4....
They also did a podcast that pretty much covered the whole topic.

I believe it was in the first 4 months of 2014 that we in the comments made a big stink about it.
KitKat and SD cards — what's fixed, what's broken and what's misunderstood http://www.androidcentral.com/kitkat-sdcard-changes

Posted my "LiquidSmooth 4.4.4" Sprint GS3 with $10 monthly FreedomPop Plan

 

[ycc]

I have read that article. (It was sent to me in the thread I just quoted. We are getting a little off topic here but I reply.)
As I see it Google are responsible for the problems I suffer. I was used to copying files with Quickpic and FS File explorer. I copied freely between different folders on the external card. I could also open any text file for writing in any folder on the external card using Jota text editor.
After Kit - Kat I can not do that any more.
As I understand this is purely due to changes Google have made and the developers of these apps can never fix it unless Google change Android.

 

[al-gsm]

whatever the situation, Android should come up with good solutions so that the handsets should not get bricked so easily..

 

[meyerweb#CB]

Having an unlocked bootloader on your device would make it virtually impossible to brick. It might bootloop, but by flashing the correct firmware you would be able to recover the device.

No. Just ask all the GS3 users who bricked their phones by flashing the ROM meant for another carrier's version of the S3.

 

[ycc]

Sorry for off topic but finding the correct, safe ROM seems to be a big problem. I bought my Galaxy Note 3 in Brazil. Not locked to any provider. Below is what comes up with *#1234#
I have no idea what ROM is safe.


(I think the bootloader is locked since the Samsung logo shows for several seconds at start up.)

 

[Sinhala Maha Raja]

I know what you say. But the question is still unanswered. Why did they design phones in such a stupid manner that they easily can be bricked?
Why didn't they isolate the "BIOS" of the phone so it does not suffer the risk of harm just because you want to load another operating system?

I am wondering the same...

 

[Sinhala Maha Raja]

I know what you say. But the question is still unanswered. Why did they design phones in such a stupid manner that they easily can be bricked?
Why didn't they isolate the "BIOS" of the phone so it does not suffer the risk of harm just because you want to load another operating system?

Ok I did little research into this....

So the boot sequence in PCs is based on the Intel x86 Instruction Set, and the one for smartphones is the ARM instruction set, for embedded Linux devices....

It's probably more efficient to combine the functionality of everything... remember, PC hardware was made to be compatible with various different operating systems, and vice versa.Also keep in mind, all these make the boot process less efficient. Whereas in embedded systems, this compatibility with other operating systems is not required... therefore they focus on efficiency, hence combining functionality...

 

[Sinhala Maha Raja]

 

[Sinhala Maha Raja]

PCs are built with openness in mind. Meaning on a PC you can install different OSs, boot from different media, install different hardware and so on. It's all under the users control and if you screw things up, you just boot from a USB stick or DVD and recover easily. PCs are meant to be tinkered with and handle accidents well. Even for accidents in the mids of a BIOS upgrade many mainboards have ways to recover from that.

Phones, tablets and game consoles are the complete opposite, they are locked down so that the user has little to no control about what is going on. Meaning a lot of tinkering has to happen in areas that the manufacturer didn't intent to be tinkered with or actively tried to prevent tinkering in. This means the tinkerer is walking a minefield and any error might put the device into an unrecoverable state.

All of this is not an accident, but by design. If manufacturers wanted to, they could make phones as easy to recover as a PC by letting the user boot from SDcard or access the internal flash storage via USB. Case in point, many bricked PSP could be recovered after people found out that booting from the memory card was possible via a modified battery. The feature was there all along, but not documented by Sony to prevent hacking.

Another issue is that even if the device allows you to recover, you would still need the data to put on the device to recover it. On a PC you have Windows install discs, Linux distributions and all that readily available to reinstall on a blank device. Getting the OS image for your phone might not be that easy.

To make things further more complicated, the ecosystem around those devices is not standardized and discoverable, which makes it hard to create software that works across different devices. A Linux distribution will work on essentially any PC, but you can't make a Linux distribution that will work as easily on every phone as all the hardware around ARM varies from manufacturer to manufacturer.

 

[Tim1954]

Thank you for that excellent discourse! I'm sure we have all learned a lot from you!