help menu

Join us on the Community Forums!

  • Community Guidelines

    The Fitbit Community is a gathering place for real people who wish to exchange ideas, solutions, tips, techniques, and insight about the Fitbit products and services they love. By joining our Community, you agree to uphold these guidelines, so please take a moment to look them over.

  • Learn the Basics

    Check out our Frequently Asked Questions page for information on Community features, and tips to make the most of your time here.

  • Join the Community!

    Join an existing conversation, or start a new thread to ask your question. Creating your account is completely free, and takes about a minute.

Not finding your answer on the Community Forums?

Cancel
Turn on suggestions
Auto-suggest helps you quickly narrow down your search results by suggesting possible matches as you type.
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

App is cryptic on failure

Replies are disabled for this topic. Start a new one or visit our Help Center.

‎11-23-2017 08:04

‎11-23-2017 08:04

All apps made by Fitbit have this issue. They are very cryptic when it comes to failure.

 

I remember bashing my head against a table when installing Surge only to find out Surge wasn't responding. If I knew that Surge wasn't responding, I'd reset the Surge and be done with it.

 

It took me another full day to understand what "Surge rejected the pairing" means. Turns out, it doesn't want to pair manually, it only pairs via the app. If the error message would have been "cannot upload", then I would not have spent that much time debugging a bluetooth connection that was working JUST FINE.

 

I have had some issues now that I moved from Windows to Android because my Surge would not sync on Android. Worked just fine on Windows, still synced via PC, wouldn't do it by Samsung S8+. After bashing my head against another table, I managed to sync it just fine after I closed my wifi - apparently there's something wrong (DNS cache? Phone DNS cache?) and the wifi doesn't do well when contacting Fitbit servers (works for everything else). It RETRIEVES info from Fitbit so I can see my calories going up because the device would sync by PC but it would not SEND data.

 

If they app would say "Sync error - Could not reach fitbit.com servers" then it would have taken me 3 seconds to try another connection, see it work and fix it. It never occured to me that it would be an issue, seeing how Windows Phone, PC and Aria all sync over the same wifi.

 

Why are you so cryptic? Literally a red exclamation mark.

 

Is there a corner where I can see what is going on? A log? Something? How is "fitbit bad" even feedback? I would very much like to keep interaction with Fitbit support to a minimum and a more open app would help.

 

Ideally, a diagnose screen would be nice, where green checkboxes pop up for "looking for X" "connect to X" "Connected" "Downloading" "Uploading to Fitbit - Error". You know, like in the 1990s.

Best Answer
1 REPLY 1

‎11-23-2017 08:53

‎11-23-2017 08:53

@Ndi wrote:

I have had some issues now that I moved from Windows to Android because my Surge would not sync on Android. Worked just fine on Windows, still synced via PC, wouldn't do it by Samsung S8+. After bashing my head against another table, I managed to sync it just fine after I closed my wifi - apparently there's something wrong (DNS cache? Phone DNS cache?) and the wifi doesn't do well when contacting Fitbit servers (works for everything else).

 

Sorry to hear that you've had so much trouble interpreting the messages on the app or tracker, @Ndi, but we here on the Community would love to help you avoid any more head banging on the table. When you first encounter an error, post a question about it here on the Community, and someone is likely to respond very quickly with a solution they have found.

 

As for the WiFi problem you encountered, that is typically a phone problem and not a Fitbit problem - many, if not most, phones share the small antenna between the Bluetooth and the WiFi, so if it is busy with one, it won't acknowledge the other.    And, yes, you cannot pair any Fitbit tracker using the phone's Bluetooth settings, they can only be paired through the Fitbit app.  There are a lot of good help articles on such topics by clicking on the Help link at the top of this page, such as this one on How do I set up my Fitbit device?

Best Answer
0 Votes