How safe is experimenting with development on real device?

[Dr. Jekyll]

Greetings,

I'm a Java developer by day and a soon to be Droid owner. I've started reading some about Android development. I understand that the emulators are available and are definitely the place to experiment, but I was wondering how likely it is that one could brick, or otherwise damage an actual phone by creating home grown applications and deploying them to the live device?

Thanks.

[RinTinTigger]

How safe is breathing experimentally into a gas-oven?

Kidding

Well, if you experiment, things can happen.
For me the first steps to be taken should be

-be able to reinstall "out of the box OS"
-be able to backup/restore stuff
-know some about hardware and developing therefor

If you check al these boxes true and can spare a device (for its GONE if you kill it ^^)
Then start developing.

Maybe there is a software simulator like there is for ALL blackberry devices. Check google on that!

Tigger

[Erron]

There is a simulator they give you when you get the sdk. Make sure you test on that first! You could really do some damage otherwise.

[Dr. Jekyll]

As I said, I am aware of the simulators. I just wondered if it was reasonably safe to take a working "Hello World" from the simulator and deploying to the phone just for the joy of seeing it actually work.

I'll stick to the simulator until I acquire more (a lot more!) knowledge.

[derekbelrose]

I actually used my phone by accident when I was following the tutorial. The hello world app is not going to brick your phone.

[gtjokester]

Well are you wanting to experiment with roms, recovery image, or the spl? if its just experiment with apps I don't think you have much to worry about, Roms are pretty easy to experiment with as long as you don't mind wiping and have a known good rom to flash.. but it seems the only bricked G1s that i recall hearing about were mostly due to flashing a custom spl with an uncompatiable radio driver version.. we need root and to get a spl that has fastboot enabled and then you can pretty much recover from anything.. You know, I understand why companies have to release the os preventing root so people don't mess with things they can't get out of, but for customers that request it they should be granted an easy way to get the access they need. Just make them sign an agreement that they understand they are at thier own risk of using it.. If Motorola was smart they would realize its going to be the community that is going to make or break the droid.. the G1 would suck if it wasn't for the community development of it. offering the option to easily get root access would open the doors to let the community make the droid the iphone killer they are hoping it to be..

Anyway sorry to wonder off topic but I wouldn't experiment too much till we have root and some roms to restore if something goes wrong.. hopefully we will get a spl bootloader that has fastboot enabled not too long after rooting

[andjarnic]

Dr Jeykell, you are not going to do any harm to your phone with just applications. As gtjokester said, if you are messing around with android OS image roms, then you could do damage. Otherwise, the only way I possibly see you doing maybe some damage is if you use the NDK and do some native level stuff. I don't even know if NDK has the option to do anything dangerous tho.

Shoot me an PM, we can talk about android programming.