Cannot change exercise settings

[bertlaverman]

In the Android app’s settings, under “Exercise”, I’m supposed to be able to enable or disable automatic recognition of exercises, or set the number of minutes to be used as a trigger for such a recognition. However, no matter what I change, the next time I open the app all settings are back to their original values. I even tried disabling all notifications, both in the app and on my Google Pixel Watch 2, but it keeps asking me if I’m doing an exercise while I ride to work or walk in the city.

when I’m actaully exercising, I just start an exercise on the watch, because you don’t want to interrupt an exercise after 15 minutes to spend a minute clicking and swiping to the correct options, so basically it’s an useless feature. For me at least. And often just annoying.

Any ideas how I can fix this?

sincerely,

Bert

[LZeeW]

Hello @bertlaverman and welcome to the Community.  I wear a Fitbit Sense 2, not a PW 2, but it sounds like your PW 2 has this same feature.  It is Walk Detect, Run Detect and Bike Detect.  It is different from the auto-recognized activities that you disabled.  Auto Detect turns on the Exercise app.  I hope the path to fix it is the same as on my Sense 2.  Open your Exercise app and choose Walk.  I swipe up on a tiny "^" on the bottom of the screen to go to my exercise settings.  Look for a Walk Detect option and toggle it off.  You need to repeat this in the Bike and Run shortcuts.

I don't know why your auto-recognition settings keep reverting back  I use an iPhone and this doesn't happen to me.  I think my answer will help you.  It just might make the auto-recognition settings issue irrelevant.

[bertlaverman]

Hi Laurie, thanks for your reply.

Unfortunately there is no such setting on the watch's "Fitbit Exercise" app. In the Android app, I only have the "Fitbit" app, with only one settings part, where those exercise settings can be found. You may not realize it, but Apple enforces pretty strict rules on how an app's user interface is organized, in the hope this provides a single "Look and Feel." For Android there is no such "User Experience" enforcement. This makes it quite common for apps from a single developer to have significant differences in their UI on Android and iOS.

Cheers,
Bert

[bertlaverman · Accepted solution]

I think I found a potential reason: Recent Android versions automagically "clean up" apps that are not often accessed, not just deleting the locally stored data, but also revoking all rights the app has. Because I interact mostly through the watch, my app was marked as "inactive". The app itself never gave any errors, but I now strongly suspect this caused the app to forget settings when closed, because the cache immediately got wiped. When I disabled this mode, it now seems to have regained its memory...

[RiekoC]

Hello @bertlaverman 

Thank you for sharing your update.

You might want to consider accessing/opening the Fitbit app more frequently. Otherwise, you could risk your tracked data not syncing to the Fitbit servers. There usually is a sync when you open the app, although my experience has been that this initial sync doesn't always update with the current tracked data. When this happens, I do a manual sync from the app.

Just to let you know, Fitbit devices usually maintain up to 7 days of tracked data. With this in mind, you should consider doing a sync at least once a week, at a minimum. If you can sync once a day, that's even better.