> The article says that safety measures at the firmware chip level are disabled.

Those are the safety measures protecting the PMIC, not the battery. Is that temperature cutoff even low enough to matter before the battery is on fire?

It isn't clear that the software protections ever mattered anyway. If the kernel crashes, or is just charging while turned off, I sure hope it's still designed to be completely safe, and not a sudden explosion risk.

No, those are protections that kernel/bootloader need to configure inside PMIC (instead of disabling them, or leaving them at wrong default values) and then PMIC will protect the battery from overheating from charging. (which is one of many sources of heat) PMIC can also send interrupt to SoC when this control loop fails, and OS is free to handle it in some other way (for example by initiating normal system shutdown)

Then PMIC operates independently from the kernel, and configuration even persists when powered off/during reboots.

HW is designed to be safe, but SW has to cooperate, including userspace. (some daemon that will help policing the whole device, based on many different inputs and by controling things that affect heat production - like preventing the user from setting backlight at max, limiting modem RF output to something that doesn't need huge amounts of power, etc. etc.)

It's a complicated area.

No, I would not trust Apple. That was my point, but seems you missed.

You really think Apple, Google , or any real company would go out of their way to disable safety limits that would cause batteries to explode?

After owning a couple android phones, real hardware manufacturers will do absolutely anything that improves profits.

That’s why I specified Google. I would also put Samsung in that category (despite their exploding battery episode).