Hi all,
I am about to flash Sailfish to a Sony Xperia 10 II device. The installation instructions say at step 2:
2 Test key functions of your Xperia 10 running Android
- Please use your Xperia™ 10 II running Android for a while prior to flashing Sailfish X.
- Use the same SIM card(s) as you will use with Sailfish X. Check that you can make and receive phone calls, and that you can hear the other person speaking and you can be heard during a phone call.
- Browse a few web pages using mobile data connection while the WLAN is turned off.
- Browse also web pages using WLAN as data connection.
- Use GPS and find the location of your phone on a map.
- Open the camera app and shoot a few photos.
- If everything works normally then please proceed.
My question is: What is all this for? Only to verify, that the hardware works (i. e. optional), or does this configure some important parts of the hardware and is thus mandatory.
I mean, the major point for me to use Sailfish OS is, that I do not want to feed the Google monster with my data. If I use Android with my new phone and my SIM card, switch on GPS location and shoot photos with Android apps and browse web pages, then Google will have my phone number, location, camera ID and device IMEI (and what not else) before I even start installing a privacy friendly OS. That takes away much of the point of using that privacy friendly OS right from the start.
So my question is: is that step still mandatory? - I think I remember reading a few years ago, that on some other device / in the past, this step was necessary to somehow initialize the phone-chip correctly which Sailfish could not do. And if you did not do at least one incoming and one outgoing phone call with Android, then Sailfish would later not be able to properly receive phone calls. Is that still the case?
Does anyone have some insight into this? I would actually rather skip this step. But of course, I would not like to risk losing any hardware functionality.