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Unreliable Communication Between Companion and Device

‎09-23-2021 11:40

‎09-23-2021 11:40

I am coding an app that has users input information on the companion to be displayed on the device screen, but I have found the companion is roughly 90% reliable in communicating with the device. It is somewhat random in terms of what is communicated, meaning that each time, the user inputs that do not show on screen up are different. I've looked through the Fitbit community and it looks like other people have had this issue, but those posts are over a year old. Has this issue been fixed yet? If not, is Fitbit working on fixing the issue?

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2 REPLIES 2

‎10-08-2021 02:06

‎10-08-2021 02:06

I've had my Fitbit for about 9 months now and have been tinkering with the SDK for most of that time, and I've never been able to get messaging between the device and companion to work 100% reliably. You have to design your app to handle these failures. This is good practice anyway - after all, the companion may simply be unable to communicate with the fitbit. They could be far apart, or one or the other could be powered down.

I would recommend resending everything each time anything changes, that way, at least once a message gets through, you can be sure the two devices are in sync. You can also try experimenting with Fitbit ASAP which I've found does improve reliability (It will send acknowledgement messages and retry if they aren't received.) Last of all, polling for changes every few minutes won't hurt either, just in case something is missed.

 

It's frustrating when the two devices are literally within a few cm of each other and yet messages are still intermittantly failing to send, but this is the current state of things. The SDK just doesn't seem to concern itself with checking whether or not the message actually reaches its destination.

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‎10-08-2021 14:28

In response to Alfinch

‎10-08-2021 14:28

@Alfinch Thanks for your response. I am glad that I am not the only person who has this issue. I have actually been playing around with the Fitbit File System, so the settings are stored locally on the device, eliminating the need to communicate with the companion.

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