Crowd intelligence does it again. Thanks to many leads in this thread, I may contribute a final conclusion to this year-long mystery:
My Sony Xperia Z3 is suffering from a corroded or detached GPS antenna inside the phone. Forget all the other Sony dumbass fixes, like A-GPS update, Sony Companion or other updates. I feel sorry for all the people who reset their phone due to naive, misleading Sony support, or who paid useless repair money.
If you threw your Xperia into a hole by now, try this:
- Install "GPS Test" and watch the satellite bars. The few you see will be red, maybe orange, meaning you have very bad signal reception. If you still detect many satellites, it’s because the AGPS data tells Android where the satellites are, but your phone cannot communicate with them.
- Plug in the USB cable WITHOUT POWER - you now have a makeshift GPS antenna! You may have to press the USB plug up towards you, which is what others refer to as “wiggling”. This may also be an indication that the USB plug now presses (or bypasses) the antenna pin inside the phone to the vis-à-vis casing connector.
- Now watch the bars turn yellow & green, until you have FIX. Push the USB plug down or remove it, and the bars will disappear again.
Of course this is not a solution, but you may find someone with a technical background who can open your phone and uncorrode (sorry for my German-English - how do you negate “corrode”?) the GPS antenna pin, or reconnect it with the casing pin.
Myself, I will refrain from buying Sony phones in the future, not because they build badly tested phones, but because of their incredibly bad support, as can be seen in this year-long thread. If only a technician had read this post, it would have been 3 instead of 11 pages long.
Let me know if you can replicate this behavior.
