My experience on Sony Xperia XA2

Update 11-04-2019 : fixed sim card error see How to fix Sony Xperia XA2 missing sim card

1 Like

Hi Damio,

thanks for sharing your experience. I am undertaking the same steps with the XA2 H4113 at the moment, unfortunately my current phone (Xperia Z1c) died before I was able to successfully switch to the XA2. I was having the same problems with BT, Wifi and fingerprint-reader with image e-0.7-o-2019072818258-dev-pioneer. After switching to e-0.7-o-2019080419016-dev-pioneer all seemed well and I transferred my SIM to try out the phone capabilities. Bad luck, the SIM was either not recognized at all or just shortly, followed by a “sim card ejected, please reboot phone”.

It was at this time when e.os suggested an OTA update which I happily applied. Bad luck again, all the fixed flaws (BT app crashing, no Wifi etc.) were back and SIM card still not detected. I tried both [e-0.7-o-2019080819469-dev-pioneer.zip] and [e-0.7-o-2019081019693-dev-pioneer.zip] which were having the same problems.
I tried some other SIM cards of which some worked and some didn’t.
Another issue was that suddenly all contacts had dissappeared and only threema contacts were still there. When I looked for a specific contact, the contacts app was looking for people of the same or similar name living in my neighborhood, or at least what the phone thought was my neighborhood. This was really spooky.

Was your XA2 initially on Android 9 Pie before your started flashing it @Damio? I’ve heard it causes issues when downgrading to custom oreo roms like /e/, lineage etc.

Hey @Damio,

I recently had some… mishaps with my XA2, culminating in constant “Bluetooth keeps stopping” errors in /e/, and then (what I assume to be) a factory defect which glitched out the screen completely.

I’m going to be returning the phone, and will probably be getting another XA2. Would you recommend this, or should I get some other model (hopefully one that also has active community support but less problems)?

I also checked out your other XA2 thread and wanted to ask if you had any extra tips for getting /e/ (and other OSes) to work (and more importantly, to not screw everything up)? This is my first time doing anything like this with Android, and this A/B flashing stuff gets really confusing.

I also noticed the XA2 was getting pretty hot while I was fiddling with it, and some other people online have also complained about high temps. Is this a problem in your experience, and is there any way to alleviate this on /e/ (underclocking, etc.)?

" I also checked out your other XA2 thread and wanted to ask if you had any extra tips for getting /e/ (and other OSes) to work (and more importantly, to not screw everything up)? This is my first time doing anything like this with Android, and this A/B flashing stuff gets really confusing."

I totally agree :slight_smile:

Thanks to Damio I fixed my SIM issue, I unfortunately had an additional obstacle which was actually the SIM card, which disconnected while in use. I got a new one from the provider and got this problem sorted out.

So far I am happy with the daily use but still got some things to find out. I am also afraid to use any OTA updates as the last one brought back all the initial flaws with BT/Wifi/etc constantly crashing the phone. Are there different builds that the new releases are based on, so that old problems come up again?

How can I be sure to trust a new update? I don’t have a spare XA2 to try out new releases before putting them in the ‘real-use’ phone.

Best regards,

Silvan

After several weeks of daily use, I experience following odd things:

  1. recently taken photographs do not show up in the gallery, instead there’s only a grey solid. After a few days, the image and the thumbnail shows up. Whenever I send, share or edit an image, it’s there right away.
  2. Issue with pdfs. I cannon read any pdfs, neither with the preinstalled MuPDF nor with MoonReader. Screen stays blank.
  3. Widgets added to the leftmost screen show up after a reboot only.
  4. The phone occasionally seems to reboot without me noticing. I only happen to know because the fingerprint reader tells me to use the code after the phone restarted.
  5. As mentioned before, the OTA-update ruins the phone and brings back the BT, Wifi and other problems.

Apart from that, I am quite happy.

Keen to know about your experience!

Silvan

I originally had the problem with bluetooth (5) you mentioned. This is due to issues with your second A/B partition. A mentioned in another XA2 post you can try the following which worked for me and no longer have update issues. Plus everything is working fine on my device, none of the other issues you report:

Set developer options to allow root over ADB then:

adb wait-for-device root

adb wait-for-device shell

dd if=/dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/dsp_a of=/dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/dsp_b

dd if=/dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/bluetooth_a of=/dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/bluetooth_b

dd if=/dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/modem_a of=/dev/block/bootdevice/by-name/modem_b

No I had Android 8.1 installed when my phone arrived.

Hi,

thanks a bunch, I’ll try that out soon and report back.

Kind regards,

Silvan

Hi

I became recenty the owner of the Sony Xperia XA2. The build installed is e-0.7-o-2019102428284.
I have a problem with the fingerprint scanner. The setting for the fingerprint scanner is nowhere in the settings menu. Does anyone know what the problem could be, or have a solution? Should it work with this build?

Kind regards,
Eugene

Hi
It works on mine with the system version 10/10/2019.
You should find it in :
Settings > Security and privacy

Hi,
In my version 20191024 there is no option in Settings > Security and privacy for the fingerprint scanner.

If it works on version 20191010, it could be a problem in 20191024. I will report this to the build makers.

Eugene

OK, thanks.
I guess I will wait and update when this issue if fixed.

Regards

Thinking about it, would it be linked to the launcher as well (option supported or not)?
Question to the experts :slight_smile: as I am a newbie :slight_smile:

Me again. I just performed the latest update from May 14th and again I ran into the old BT-error, as usual.
I then updated manually which worked ok.

  1. Downloaded latest /e/.zip on Windows-PC
  2. Booted into recovery holding VolumeUp+On/Off
  3. Chose Update using ADB (Update from local MicroSD did not show the zip-file)
  4. Connected Phone to PC
  5. Started Update with adb sideload e-0.9-o-2020051454222-dev-pioneer.zip
    After Installation an reboot all worked fine again, no data lost, no issues with the wrong bootslot.

FYI

Hi Silvan,

Thank you for this information, especially for “After Installation an reboot all worked fine again, no data lost, no issues with the wrong bootslot”.
Is it clear why the OTA update had issues, while the manual update was OK?
And, just out of curiosity, have you ever experience issues like “Sony XA2 (H4113) - Call history + SMS templates” ?

Thank you very much in advance

Sorry for my delayed answer. So far I have not had any problems concerning the call history or message templates.

Thank you very much for the reply