I too am fairly sure it is not a hardware error.
I have two Sony XA2s, both single sim H3113 models. One is on Sailfish Verla 4.2 paid version, the other is now on Android 9. Both were bought new and well looked after. Neither has been dropped, drowned or had any repair work done. The Sailfish XA2 has occasionally had to be returned to Android 8 prior to a necessary reflash after some serious problem made the software non-functional.
The reason I have two phones is that the Android XA2 is a reference phone (I don’t actually use it as a daily driver at all) for when things don’t work on Sailfish and to see if they did work on Android. Now obviously this won’t root out a hardware failure of the specific Sailfish device, but it will probably root out whether there is a generic hardware design issue across the single sim XA2 phone in general.
My observations are:
- GPS work flawlessly and gets a lock in seconds on the Android 9 XA2
- GPS works flawlessly and gets a lock on the Sailfish XA2 when it has been returned to Android 8 prior to re-flashing Sailfish - so there is not an individual hardware issue on either of my XA2 phones.
- GPS does not work almost at all on the Sailfish XA2. The ‘wrong’ position, sometimes a mile or so away, and therefore useless for navigation, is found within seconds (probably due to MLS data, perhaps the nearest cell tower) but a proper positional fix can take over an hour, even outside in the open, and often never.
- The Sony XA2 was/is a mainstream global Android model for Sony. They have sold millions of phones. If there were a general hardware design issue with GPS not working then (a) there would uproar, and (b) such a failure would be visible on message boards, in reviews and so on. It isn’t. So its not an XA2 hardware design issue.
- There are over 335 posts in this ‘GPS not working’ thread, admittedly not all specifically saying that GPS doesn’t work on the XA2, but a huge number nonetheless. Common sense says these GPS issues cannot all be due to individual hardware failures.
The only logical conclusion I can therefore come to is that there is a problem with the Sailfish software, or perhaps more likely, a problem in how Sailfish interfaces to the GPS hardware via blobs or whatever.
Either way I can’t see how it can be a hardware problem - either with an individual device or a generic hardware design issue across all XA2’s of this model.