While I agree and understand everyone's response to silvercats question, I don't think anyone really answered it???
I think the questions is, Is Android more susceptible to bricking than a PC? If so, why?
I don't think it's a hardware issue because computers have different hardware yet Microsoft gives everyone administrative powers for Windows and computers don't brick if you install different programs. Would a PC be unusable/unrecoverable if you tried to install iOS on it?
There are a few things here:
The
process of rooting is something you don't have to do on a PC. On most phones (apart from those which come with unlocked bootloaders) it involves some exploit to gain root access - as does jailbreaking an iPhone, since the OP mentioned that. However, if you use a procedure that's been tested
for your phone model you are actually pretty safe.
Once the phone is rooted, running with root access is no more dangerous than running a PC as administrator. Yes, you can render a phone unbootable if you delete vital files, but the same is true on a PC. And the solution, if you were silly enough to do this without taking a backup first, would be to reinstall the ROM, exactly the same as you might end up reinstalling the OS on a PC in similar circumstances. And remember that
all that most PC owners ever do with their administrator access is install apps or change system settings.
I think that part of the problem here is that the term "brick" is used rather loosely. It's easy enough to mess the ROM up so phone won't boot, but I'd argue that's not a true brick because it's easily fixable -
unless you've no backup and don't have a compatible ROM you can flash in its place. Install a custom recovery built for a phone that uses a different partition mapping system for its internal memory, or a bootloader from a different device, and you could have a true brick, i.e. something there's no way back from (or not with the tools that most of us have access to). But that's a lower-level modification - the PC analogy wouldn't be installing an incompatible operating system but more like flashing an incompatible BIOS.
I'd also note that some of the things the OP mentioned are not really to do with root. Hardware failure is hardware failure, and "sudden death" is a term I associate with a particular bug in some SGS3 variants (fixed by a kernel patch to stop the particular condition occurring).
So I'd just reiterate what everyone else is saying: the most important thing is to do your reading, understand what you are doing and make sure that anything you use is compatible with your specific phone. Don't just assume that some recipe for a different device works for yours, or that if there's no recovery for your phone you can use one built for a different one. If you get into trouble, ask rather than just doing what comes to mind. And if you don't feel comfortable with anything, don't do it.
