Fitbit Aria 1 - Forced Obsolescence?

[jcwillia1]

I'm seeing reports of users on Reddit no longer being able to register their scales on Wifi, essentially bricking the device.

Is this a case of Fitbit no longer supporting the Aria 1 scale and if so why wasn't there an announcement?

[JohnnyRow]

Is your original Aria having problems?

[LZeeW]

@jcwillia1  Fitbit has not made any kind of announcement about the original Aria.  The last time Fitbit decommissioned a device was when it decommissioned the Ultra.  There was plenty of notification about that.  Fitbit has a Legacy Device Policy for older devices and the Aria isn't even listed as a legacy device.

There IS something going on with Fitbit scales, for sure.  This forum isn't monitored by the moderators.  I will flag this and hope a moderator will help sort this out.

Reddit thread 

[N8teGee]

I've seen the Reddit thread myself. It's worth mentioning that the Aria 1's setup wasn't through the Fitbit app, but instead through a Web interface. Once that set up was complete the scale would then show in the Fitbit app.

https://www.fitbit.com/scale/setup/start 

[GallopingCow]

I've spent the past two days trying to reconnect an original Aria scale to a new SSID and finally got it to work today.

The trick for me was to use an old iPad. Neither my laptop on WiFi, nor my Galaxy S21 Ultra would work.

On the iPad using Safari, I went to http://www.fitbit.com/scale/setup/start and followed the instructions. It worked flawlessly the first time.

Every time I used a newer device, I could connect to the Aria's SSID, but then it wouldn't load the following page to let me view my local networks. It would attempt to load http://1.scale.www.fitbit.com/scale/setup but I would get a DNS error. I even tried loading the page manually by IP (192.168.240.1), and the page would load, but it would not show any local networks.

It wasn't until I performed the exact same steps on an old iPad Air that I was able to get the Aria scale connected to my WiFi again.

[N8teGee]

@GallopingCow are you using a private DNS or some type of ad blocker on your newer device that isn't set up on your old iPad?

Unfortunately the setup process with the Aria was never very good. This improved significantly with the Aria 2 (they added Bluetooth for setup purposes) and being able to set this up in the app. 

[GallopingCow]

I am on my laptop, but not on my S21 Ultra, and I got the same message on both. It's possible Chrome was doing something, since I used the same browser on both of those devices before I switched to my iPad which defaulted to Safari.

Interestingly, when trying to initiate setup from the Fitbit Android app on my S21 Ultra, the app simply said "Replace with new device? We've discontinued software updates for this device. Certain features may not work as expected," with no way to continue.

On the iPad version of the Fitbit app (current version as of last night), below this message was a link to open Safari and continue setup. That process worked without any problem.

[JohnnyRow]

An Aria 1 scale setup problem has supposedly recently been fixed.