Some problems with the App. Mainly GPS issues.

[Wlzzz]

I have been using Fitbit products now for over 2 years and I'm being tired of the many problems the software has. Hardware itself has been decent.(though replacing the band every 6 months is not optimal). Now I'm using Charge HR 2 with Nokia 5(Android 7.1.2).

First minor thing is that some features are missing which can be found from W10 desktop app. I understand that some features are not practical to use with the phone screen, but still there are some strange missing features. Like why can I only edit some exercises from the phone but not all? Seems that I can only edit auto-tracked exercises, but not anything that has been manually started. For those I need to use the desktop App.

Second minor thing is that notifications sometimes just stop working. Usually this can be fixed by restarting the feature and/or reconnecting bluetooth.

All the major concerns are mostly about GPS functionality which seems to be abysmal.

First of all, why is GPS only usable for 3 different exercise types? I have not researched this matter much, but do the more expensive models support GPS with other exercise types? If not, I do not understand why GPS is not optional for every type of exercise.  Now I have to use hiking for cross-country skiing if I want to know the distance.

Secondly, often the connected GPS feature is totally useless. Sometimes it works fine, but usually the result is not worth of anything. I understand that it might be issue with the phone and device losing connection, but there seems to be nothing at all to compensate those disconnections. In example, if the device loses connection and I travel for like 2km to any direction, that 2km is lost. So there is just straight line from start of disconnection to end of disconnection and the distance between them is ignored. So app just presumes that I have teleported between those locations. Lately I have seen really strange GPS results where it seems that I have been going backwards. It is hard to explain, but from the results it seems that I have been going to other direction that I actually did. This usually presents itself with disconnections that I explained earlier. I have one example where I seem to have 2 disconnections pretty early on my route. The App connects the line from starting point of first disconnection to starting point of second disconnection. And again ending point of first disconnection to ending point of second disconnection. This causes really strange line to be drawn as my route. Picture showing this below. Red line is the Fitbit route and black shows the actual direction.

Strange GPS

 
If I start GPS tracking from the phone, these problems do not exists. It seems to work just fine. Which brings up the next issue...

There seems to be (still) bug in the App which prevents me from pausing and ending the GPS tracking from phone. If I have started exercise from phone with GPS tracking, the pause button seems to be unresponsive after I have finished my exercise. The button in upper right corner which toggles the audio guidance seems to work fine so the UI is not hung or anything. I only have managed to stop this by going to Android app settings and forcefully quitting the Fitbit App. After restarting the App, the same screen appears, but now the pause button actually works. Though this only worked for two times. On third time it stopped the exercise, but the results was lost. I had to manually insert the exercise data, but GPS data was lost. Reading the forums this seems to be really old bug and how is this not fixed yet? It's not a minor bug or anything...

Maybe this is enough for now. There might be more that I have encountered but this is all that I can remember for now.

I really would like to keep using Fitbit products because I have already two years of data in there. But it keeps getting harder and harder with these software issues and bands which wont last over 6 months.(at least they are replaceable now and Fitbit support is really excellent on this matter)

[RobertoME]

Hi there @Wlzzz, thank you for visiting the Fitbit Community! I was reading your post and thank you for your feedback, definitely I will forward your comments to our teams since this type of feedback help us to keep improving the Fitbit experience.

Regarding the option to edit exercise you are correct, this option is not available for all the type of exercises and will depend of the platform as you said. Thanks to other members of Fitbit  we have under consideration to implement this feature, although we do not have a timeframe yet.  If this is something in which you're interested, I would like to share with you the following feature suggestion, feel free to contribute with your vote and comments, it would be nice to have your support for this ideas.

Connected GPS works mostly for default outdoor activities that you can select from your exercise shortcuts, since for those exercises that are not capable to connect with GPS are in the majority for indoor exercises. There is a new idea that is similar that perhaps you may want to review: Add more Outdoor/ Freestyle activites to exercises.

Now regarding the issue of the incorrect map course, there are some reasons that might interfere with the connection, resulting with an incorrect map. One of this reasons can be the environment you are in since it  an affect the signal strength of GPS. For example, if you are running in an urban environment with many tall buildings or threes. So at the moment it lose connection it will try to pin point your location by an approximate location or the nearest GPS connection your phone can find. 

This is something similar happening with Android version 8.0 (Oreo).  Perhaps it may provide you some help. The workaround in this scenarios is to turn on the notification widget in settings:
- Tap on tracker in your Fitbit app
- Tap Notifications
- Turn on "Notification Widget"

Turning on the widget prevents Android from shutting off the connection between the phone and tracker.

Regarding the MobileRun feature that is freezing, we are aware of some glitches affecting this portion of the app and rest assure we are stuill working on them. However I haven't seen any related to unresponsive commands with the pause button at this scale.

Something to consider is that at the moment the Nokia 5 according to our list of compatible devices, still is not compatible. So in these instances doesn't mean it won't work, but the app may not behave as is expected. An example of this is like you mentioned before with the eventual interruption of the connection to received notifications from your phone. Nonetheless our team is always working to test and add more Android devices to the supported devices list, so keep an eye open for future updates, I know is not a prompt solution, but we are working hard to deliver the best expirncie and provide our most avid users like you, what they want!

In the other side I'm happy to hear you have been treated well as you deserve regarding the wristband by our Customer support team.

See you later and let me know if you have more feedback.

[Wlzzz]

Hi Roberto and thanks for your response.

Good to know that the first minor issue is at least under consideration.

On the first GPS issue I did not mean the connected GPS tracking for exercise shortcuts. I only have 3 different GPS tracking exercise options on the phone App too.(run,hike,walk). And there are tons of other outdoor sports which are not included. That idea which you posted at this matter pretty much explains this situation and would fix it. And I think it should be pretty easy to implement instead of adding GPS options to all outdoor sports there is separately. I'm giving my vote, but its strange that this matter does not have more support already. Maybe there have already been other ones. In my opinion this would hugely increase usefulness of the tracker and the App.

Well buildings are not the issue in my case but trees might be in some cases. But still this issue is only present in connected GPS(from exercise shortcut from the tracker) and not the manually started one(from the phone App). And losing GPS connection should not give that kind of path in any case. That seems to be a bug.

Notification widget has been on, so that is not a fix for these issues.

I need to do some more testing about this pause button issue. Some people said on older posts that it was time related. That after 1hour of exercise, the pause button stops working. This actually might be the issue here too because I remember using this feature before and it has worked just fine. But my latest exercises have all been over 1hour. I will report my findings later. What is the best way to report this issue if I find something more on this matter? Should I make separate topic or contact fitbit support by email?

I feared that Nokia 5  might not be on the compatible list and it might cause some issues. Still Nokia phones have one of the cleanest Android installations on the market. Though these issues might be more hardware specific.(at least the GPS ones)

[Wlzzz]

Now I have lost all hope with the Fitbit App. I just can't get proper GPS results in any way.

Same problem with the connected GPS still exists. Usually it calculates the distance as half of what it should be, though the route on the map is still correct.

But the GPS tracking in the App is just terrible. It has so many ways to mess up your exercise tracking. Here is a list of some things it has done to me.

• Not getting GPS signal  at all while other apps still get it. Resulted to discarded exercise because Fitbit App wont let me save exercise where you have not moved at all.
• Pause button not working and resulting to not be able to finish the exercise. (this is the most common problem)
• The exercise screen(time and distance) actually disappearing and suddenly appearing later. This was a really strange one. Resulted  1hour too long exercise but the route was actually correct!
• Most of the times when I'm actually able to finish the exercise(pause button actually starts working...), the exercise wont save at all. Map screen on end results is blank and recent exercises screen keeps loading forever. When I push the back button. It goes to exercises screen and seems that the tracked exercise is discarded.

So basically if I want reliably to save the exercise, I should use the connected GPS tracking started from the Charge HR2. But this results in incorrect distance calculation.

If I want accurate distance, I should use the tracking from the App. But this is so unreliable that most of the time my exercises wont save at all.

In past months I don't think I have got single result with GPS that is correct and did not have any problems. Only thing that seems to work is running with connected GPS. But I have feeling that it uses stride length to calculate the distance and not the GPS.

I think I have never seen so randomly acting software from big company these days. And it feels that these issues are not going to be fixed at all.

So my solution to this problem is probably going to be to purchase another product from another company. I'm thinking Polar A370. At least in their App it is possible to use GPS with more than 3 exercise types... It is shame because I have over 2 years long activity log already. But I just can't stand anymore such a faulty App.