Android app confuses country and language!

[mattpr]

Had first and second gen fitbit trackers.  Finally decided to give their watches a try with the Sense (been a loyal Pebble guy for a long time).

Anyway trying to get used to the touchscreen interface, options, organization, paradigms so the watch is more useful than clunky (not there yet).  

Was going through the settings in the android app and updated my country to Germany since that is where I am located (relevant for data privacy and some locale data, currency, etc).  Nothing changed in the app (still in English) but I started getting daily emails in German and push notifications from the app in German even though the app language is still in English.

Seriously stupid user experience.  country != language and it smells of very inexperienced (or US centric) development team if they are making this mistake.  If this is a setting for language, call it language and make it a language selector instead of a country selector.  If you are trying to use one selector for both language and country that also won't work because many people in different countries speak different languages (en-US, es-US, de-CH, fr-CH, it-CH, etc).  Country selection is relevant for regulatory regime (privacy, billing, VAT, etc) as well as locale defaults (e.g. units, date, number formats...which you should still let a user customize).  Language selection should be independent of all that because you have many expats speaking different languages while resident in specific countries as well as many countries with multiple official languages.

I guess this is probably a known issue, but when I saw this I face-palmed in disbelief.

Come on.  If you want to be a serious competitor on user experience, you can't do things like this.  UX is more critical the smaller a device gets.

Moderator Edit: Subject formatting

[LokeAa]

@mattpr I agree, kind of stupid, but toggle off "Automatic time zone" and "Place", set your timezone manually (GMT+2), restart your Sense. It should do the trick. 

[mattpr]

Thanks for the reply.  It isn't a timezone problem.  Auto-timezone is fine.

The issue is location.  Location: auto-location is off.

I manually select Germany (regulatory/billing location, etc)...app stays in english but app notifications are in German and I start getting daily emails from fitbit in German.

I can lie and select United Kingdom or USA as my location...but they aren't my location, they are just random english speaking countries...because this location selector is apparently (also?) a language selector.

[LokeAa]

For some reason you have totoggle off "Automatic time", that's how I got Norwegian instead of English.

[mattpr]

Automatic timezone is on and hasn't caused any problems.
The only thing I changed (besides some units) was the Location/Country (different setting than timezone).  Auto-location is off.
This is what messed up the language for me.

In any case what you are experiencing also sounds like a bug.  The point of my post is that hopefully fitbit wants to fix their bugs.  But maybe I'm pissing in the wind.  This is my first experience with fitbit in years.  We see...not a great first impression so far in terms of their attention to detail.

[mattpr]

Would be great to get a short statement from Fitbit regarding this issue.  In particular...

If I want the app/notifications/emails in English do I need to set my country to US or UK?  Or is there some way to set my country to Germany (regulatory reasons) and set the language separately?
Will German regulatory environment still be respected (in particular GDPR and data-privacy and data-transfer controls) -- ie by detecting location -- if I set the country to USA to get notifications/email in english?

Or do I not get a choice.  I need to set the country to Germany and use the app (well notifications/emails...the app is still in english) in German in order to be able to have Fitbit respect the rules of the country where I am resident?

Thanks

[mattpr]

So I looked at the country selector again to try and deduce what Fitbit's product team was thinking.

See screenshots...

• you see two selections for Canada. 
  • One French and
  • one says nothing (presumably English?)
• For Belgium, the country name is written three times with slashes in between as a single entry (French, Flemmish, German...the languages of Belgium).
  • But says (English) in parentheses.  English is not an official language of Belgium, so I guess that is why it is stated explicitly.
• For Switzerland (three official languages: German, French, Italian)
  • You have three rows with Switzerland written in each local language.  
  • Language is implied and not specified separately in parenthesis.

So I guess this country selector has a few scenarios:

• country has one official language
  • write country name in official language (ie Deutschland instead of Germany)
  • don't list language separately in parenthesis
• country has more than one official language
  • write country name in official language(s) (if different...Canada is Canada in both French and English)
  • write language after country name if not the default/official language -- or if the spelling of the country name doesn't imply the language (ie canada is same in french and german, Switzerland is DIFFERENT in german/french/italian, belgium is different in german/flemmish/french...but none are supported so english is specified)
    • Not sure why Canada english doesn't say "(English)" but the french version does.
    • The app apparently supports french (at least for switzerland) so not sure why it doesn't offer french for Belgium.

Wow. I would never want to code that convoluted logic or be a product person trying to define requirements for this to my developers.

So you are definitely selecting a country AND a language at the same time. 

This is messy because:

• some countries have multiple official languages
• a country's name may differ depending on the official language used
• not all of a country's languages may be supported by the app...so someone in that country might be forced to use a language they aren't comfortable with if they want to select the correct country.

This can be much less confusing and give the users more control while still having sensible defaults.

Here are some free product requirements for the team to fix this...

• Offer a separate language selector FIRST (ie before country)
  • This supports only the languages that fitbit/translators want to support for their app/services.
  • If you want to offer language variants (e.g. french-belgium vs french-france vs french-switzerland), then you just specify those and let the user choose the variant they want.
    • But belgian french speakers will appreciate being offered some french option rather than being forced to use english if they are in Belgium.
  • This lets the user pick their preferred language from a list of languages supported by fitbit independent of where the user is or any other settings.
  • You can select default language based on OS language and/or user geo-location.
  • But if you don't use their OS language setting, you should prompt the user to select/confirm language when they first open the app so they don't have to find the language setting navigating the app in a language they may not know.
  • ideally this language setting should be synced between app(s) and website/online services (e.g. website, email messages, marketing, etc) and is a fitbit account level setting.
• Offer country selection next
  • country list display is selected based on user's language. e.g.
    • if a user's language selection is some German language variant then USA will show as: "Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika"
    • whereas if they have selected English they will see USA or United States of America
  • correct country selection is important for regulatory and billing reasons (privacy, billing location/currency, billing entity on fitbit's end, etc).
  • can default selected country based on geo-location but allow user to override.
  • this should also be synced to fitbit online services as an account-level setting for privacy/regulatory/billing reasons.
• Keep other locale options individually selectable.  You can default them based on country selection but should let a user override them.
  • number format (e.g. decimal/thousands separator)
  • date format (DD.MM.YY vs MM/DD/YY vs DD/MM/YY vs YYYY-MM-DD, etc)
  • time format (12 vs 24).
  • units (weight, distance, etc)
  • timezone
    • manual or autodetected based on location.  default to autodetected....or don't offer this setting and just rely on OS time/zone for the app.  webapp may need a timezone override if the app doesn't correctly detect a user's location/timezone.
  • etc

[wes_mkr]

I'm not sure if you found a solution for this, but I selected Europe as the country to keep my Charge 4 in English. It is super annoying for the watch to switch to Deutsch when the correct country is selected. 

[Guy_]

Hi @wes_mkr - did you go to the web profile and select Language by Region/country and choose English UK & submit and sync

If this doesn't work you may need to click profile photo in the Fitbit App and App settings and remove automatic location.

[wes_mkr]

I didn't want to select UK (English) because I am not in the UK. The issue is when you select Deutschland, there is only 1 language option, which is Deutschland (Deutsch). What I wanted was to be able to select Deutschland as the country/location and English as the language, unfortunately there is no Germany (English) option so the workaround I did was to select Europe (English) since that would technically be still correct location-wise.

[Guy_]

@wes_mkr- either Europe (English) or UK (English) should work.

It is indeterminate for the sake of "Europe", if the UK is still there, or moved to it's own continent now! lol

You will have to see how automatic location affects your choice. I've always used it set off, without any problems. My watch and app stay in English even though not in the UK either.

[senora75]

Here I am nearly a year later with the same problem. I live in Mexico and use English as my language. This has worked fine for more than five years. Now suddenly in March 2023, My iphone reverts to Spanish, and when it syncs, it changes my website language also to Spanish! Whoa! And I can't use the USA as my country of residence because the US is on Daylight Savings time and Mexico is not. Why is this  suddenly a problem.