Overheat1859 Brave has been pinging gstatic, Amazon, eBay, ESPN and a bunch more concerning connections upon opening the app. You can check this your self with a custom DNS like Next DNS and observing the logs.
brave on android is just buggy in that sense. Most of the pings are prefetch of the "top sites" on the homepage.
It preloads some "top sites" out of the box (instagram, espn, and others...).
Now here's the bug: If you "disable", the homepage from the options, starting brave from a blank page for example, what happens is that the links on the (not)disabled homepage are still being prefetched.
To stop the pings at startup you need to:
- re-enable all the homepage options until your browser will boot on the infamous homepage full of "top sites".
- remove, site-per-site all the top sites. Long click on them and remove.
- pings disappeared (most of them; you will still note safe-browsing google and autupdate-components pings for example).
This type of bugs are syntomous of how much they care about privacy, but at least they are not proposely harmful and, with a bit of configs, brave can be set as a pretty decent browser.
Also, my unpopular personal raccomendation is to reconsider firefox-based browser.