Hi @Mikey04 I just went through this yesterday with my7 year old also bawling his eyes out because I had to tell him it was going to take a while for me to get it sorted for him so he wasn't going to be able to wear it to school. So felt compelled to jump on here and create a forum account so there will be less sad kids out there 🙂
It seems related to Google buying fitbit and getting rid of fitbit accounts and making everyone migrate their accounts to google that this feature no longer works in the latest versions of the app.
You will need an android phone or tablet to carry this out, doesn't matter how old. This is because you can not install old versions of the app on an iPhone
I found the fix on these forums (credit to @liamhstokes ) fortunately I have a fitbit account and had not yet migrated it to google.
(If you have already migrated your account to google then the below will not work for you, unless you create a new fitbit non google account just to get the watch working and aren't worried about syncing your kids watch to your normal phone, it could just be synced to this old Android device)
>On the Android phone you will need to enable the installation of a_p_k files
Settings > Apps > Menu > Special access > Install unknown apps (the location or name of this setting may vary depending on the android version)
>Download an old version of the fitbit app, This one was suggested http://tiny.cc/bylfwz but if you get an error along the lines of 'error parsing the package' then you may need to look on that site for an even older version of the app, I had to find one compatible with Android 7 (http://tiny.cc/gpu7yz) as I was using a very old Android phone we had laying around.
>Login to the fitbit app on the Android device using your (non google) fitbit account, this won't mess anything up with your stats so no need to worry.
(It's at this point you could create a new non google fitbit account if you have already migrated your own one)
>click the profile picture top left corner.
>Then click 'My Family' then add and create a new child account.
This will now let you go through the process of setting up the Ace watch, be sure to go through the whole process of adding the watch to the phone using Bluetooth( don't worry it's easy to transfer to you main phone when finished) It may want to update the software at the end which takes a while but I went through this and it worked fine. ( if you stop after creating the account but before adding the watch it won't work)
Once this is done add the watch via the Bluetooth settings on your normal iPhone and you can then switch between parent view and kids view within the app (You> Family>Kids Name) - as long as the kids fitbit is connected via Bluetooth You may have to add it like it's a new device again under your childs account to your own phone but it's fine to go through this process
Should then be working fine, let me know how this goes for you!
Apparently we need to migrate our account to google before the end of 2024 to keep historical data so hopefully Google and Fitbit make things work better before we are required to do that but for now I have a very happy child who is loving his watch so it's worth the effort 🙂
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