Step count goes backwards often; often it removes completed steps/hour activity

[JerryHam]

Posting here since the Pixel Watch forum says to post this on the Fitbit forum and there is no Fitbit forum specific to the Pixel Watch 3.

Pixel Watch 3, and before it Pixel watch 2 often removes steps that it has already counted. Sometimes this results in hours that were previously shown as completed (for the 250 steps per hour counts) now showing as incomplete. It happens all the time - at least several times per week - and to multiple different people if you look at the threads there have been on this over the last couple of years. Here's one example from another user: https://support.google.com/googlepixelwatch/thread/338512926?hl=en 

Obviously I don't always have screenshots of the BEFORE since you really aren't planning on a step counter going backwards. But I do have a few and here are a couple of examples just from this month:

As you can see here, hour 2 was completed. Then, 20 minutes later, it is no longer showing as completed.

In this one, at 5:47 AM, I had 710 steps. But by 6:06 AM, it had gone backwards to 477.

This is really frustrating. There is no other app connected (no Google Fit on the phone counting steps or anything like that). This is just Fitbit on the watch connected to Fitbit on Android. Very straightforward, a stock watch face, and no 3rd party stuff. Again, happened on PW2, happens on PW3 but is all Fitbit related. Can we just get a watch that counts only forward? It seems like that should be easy to do in software.

[lincbeck]

This has been happening for a lot of people off and on for well over a year. It works for a while. Then they do an update and it stops working again. Rinse and repeat. And then the steps on your watch and in the app won't match either. It's so frustrating since this is pretty basic stuff that a fitness watch should do, but they don't seem to have a permanent fix for this since it keeps happening. Today my watch steps have gone backwards and forwards 5 different times and at no point did the steps on the watch and in the app match. I have a pixel phone and PW2 for reference.