I went for a walk on country roads and set the Fitbit Android App to map my walk as I have many times in the past. But, when I completed the walk and told the app to Finish the activity, it had recorded less than half of the walk - in looking at the map it created, it had mapped the first mile or so of the walk and then showed nothing until about 3 miles into the walk when the phone rang and I answered it. Then, it mapped about another mile and stopped recording again until I got back home an pressed the Stop button. It then drew lines to connect the missing sections, and calculated the miles by going straight from Point B to C and from Point D to Point E, etc.
Since the app had never done this before, I checked to see what was different and why it quit working. I discovered the phone had updated to Android Marshmallow 6.0, and it had added two new "features" - Doze and App Standby:
"App Standby allows the system to determine that an app is idle when the user is not actively using it. The system makes this determination when the user does not touch the app for a certain period of time and none of the following conditions applies:
The user explicitly launches the app.
The app has a process currently in the foreground (either as an activity or foreground service, or in use by another activity or foreground service).
The app generates a notification that users see on the lock screen or in the notification tray.
When the user plugs the device into a power supply, the system releases apps from the standby state, allowing them to freely access the network and to execute any pending jobs and syncs. If the device is idle for long periods of time, the system allows idle apps network access around once a day."
So, what had happened is that the new App Standby feature had put the Fitbit App in standby even though I had left it running on the screen, because I did not "touch the app for a certain period of time". Each time the phone was touched, it started tracking the walk again, until it went back to standby mode.
After a littler research, I found I could disable that feature for select apps by going to Settings -> Battery Manager -> Battery Optimization, selecting the desired app, and turning off optimization for that app. I turned off optimization for the Fitbit App, my mail client, and the phone. Today, I tested the Fitbit App's Map My Walk feature, after turning off the optimization, and it worked correctly.
If your phone is running Android Marshmallow 6.0, and you are experiencing problems with the Fitbit app, check the Battery Optimization settings.
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