I think our society is set to implode due to our lack of awareness and incompetents. Relying upon others to keep you safe is a form of incompetence.
Explore open source hardware. Go solar punk. Keep your dumb phone and your smart pad separate physical devices, which proxy.
Good luck staying safe!
It's not inconceivable, but it is extraordinarily unlikely (and even harder to engineer). Even in critical conditions, batteries are extremely unlikely to actually explode. Burst into flames, sure, if there's physical damage or the battery protection circuitry was bypassed. Explode? Not really.
Iphones had that wifi/Bluetooth transceiver bug THE WHOLE TIME
FOR OVER TEN YEARS A PRIMITIVE EXPLOIT ALLOWED SUB-SYSTEM (pre- kernel) REMOTE ACCESS.
Your bases do not belong to themselves.
Think proactively, not as fodder.
buff
You speak with confidence to yesterday's troubles that were not so far away.
Your confidence is your undermining, Man.
Going through the effort of compromising a supply chain and creating fake devices with explosives is way too much work. You're a very soft target. Getting to you is easy.
Israel used such a complicated way to get at its enemies because their targets are harder. They are militants at war. It's get to get physically close to them, and they are on the lookout for assassination attempts.
If for some reason they felt compelled to get at you through your device that way, it wouldn't be a phone. Those are too densely packed to put explosives inside and still function as you expect. They can't get to your specific phone before it's sold to you.
But if you're worried about all the ways somebody could kill you, you're completely out of luck. If somebody really wanted you dead, you'd be dead.