Charge 4 distance information inaccurate

[RobH2069]

Bought a Fitbit Charge 4 for the main purpose of tracking my 5k runs more accurately. Turns out I am better off using Strava app directly from my phone. The Charge 4 has built-in GPS. You would have thought that that would make it accurate and that Fitbit would use the GPS to determine distance traveled. Well, you thought wrong. I used Google Maps to accurately determine a route that was precisely 5k and ran it using the Fitbit and separately using Strava on my phone.

The Fitbit thinks I ran 5.15km when I actually ran 5.0km. I have done tests 3 times now and each time, Fitbit is way out with their estimations. I have read that they use some crappy algorithm to do with your stride to determine distance. Well it doesn't work and is completely unnecessary when you have GPS installed anyway. Strava app shows you your split times for each kilometer and your average speed. Fitbit shows different (inaccurately faster) split times even if you upload the same data from the Fitbit device to Strava.

So if you want inaccurate distances and speeds to boost your ego or give you false positives, then buy a Fitbit. If you want to know precisely how fast you can run 5k, use the free Strava app on your phone. The strava app can log cycling too (again more accurately than Fitbit). Sleep mode is fun to see, once. I am not particularly interested in step counting, Fitbit pay or logging calories. I shouldn't have bothered buying the Fitbit as it now only serves as a device to check my pulse rate. A waste of money. 

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[AlejandraFitbit]

Welcome to the Community, @RobH2069.

I understand how are you feeling and appreciate the feedback provided. Fitbit devices calculate distance based on the device’s accelerometer data and stride length setting.

Default stride length is based on your height and gender. If available, Fitbit devices use GPS data to calculate more precise distances.When you sync your device, our algorithm interprets the data from the device, and you see your distance traveled in the Fitbit app. 

Note that when you track an exercise with GPS, both GPS and accelerometer data are used to calculate the distance shown in the Fitbit app. For more information about accuracy, check the article: How accurate are Fitbit devices?.

Let me know if you need anything else. 🙂

[RobH2069]

Thanks for your reply however the device is not measuring distance correctly. I have done further tests, amending my stride length manually. Looking at the maps it creates, the end position is never correct. At least 20m short of where I actually stop. I measured a 1km route and it came back as 0.98km. I ran the same route using my phone's GPS and strava and it came back with 1.0km. I walked the route using the fitbit and it again came back with 0.98km. When this data was sent over to the Strava app it came back as 0.97km. How often is the GPS sending and receiving pulses from a satellite, once every 20 seconds? So maybe it is the GPS in the fitbit that is unreliable, maybe it is the algorithm using stride length and steps? It is impossible to tell. Why would anyone design a fitbit with inbuilt GPS and then use guesswork to determine distance? Insanity! Why is it that my phone can recognise my global position but my fitbit can't? Even if I can mess about changing the stride length manually 20 times to get the fitbit to recognise 1km, how do I know whether it will recognise 5k or 10k? We run at different speeds for these distances so a system that uses steps x stride length is going to vary massively to the actual distance run. Ultimately this device is useless. Why not have a setting to ONLY use GPS? I don't want to use steps and stride length because it is not accurate. But Fitbit have made it impossible to do that. I am massively disappointed with this device and 100% would never recommend it to anyone! 

[NatOnnuch]

Totally same issue here.. what a waste of money. If it calculate distance by stride length, why GPS is needed? And if so, I need to run at the same pace very constantly to result in correct distance

[RobH2069]

Update: I just ran my first ever 10k using both Strava app using my phone's GPS and my Charge 4 fitbit. The fitbit is even more out than before. According to my phone I ran 10.02km. According to my fitbit I ran 10.44km with a much faster speed. It would be lovely to think that I am so much fitter by just believing the fitbit but it is obviously completely inaccurate. Last time on a 5k run it overestimated distance by 150m. This time 440m over twice the distance. The fitbit is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. The engineers need to change their algorithm to ONLY use GPS or else what is the point of having GPS? Daft idea and makes the product completely redundant. Not a happy customer to say the least! 

[LizzyFitbit]

Hi @RobH2069 and @NatOnnuch. I'm glad to see you here in the forums.

Thanks for sharing more details about your Charge 4, and for the steps tried. I'm sorry that you're having this experience and let me give you a hand. Although you're using GPS to track your data, please know that your tracker will use your step count to calculate distance until your tracker finds a signal. That means that the total distance calculated for a workout may be slightly less accurate if the GPS wasn't available for the entire time. That being said, may I know if your tracker was connected to GPS during the whole exercise? Do you also have discrepancy with the distance when not doing exercise, meaning in your daily activities?

If you've not done so, please check this help article which describes which factors may affect the GPS connection. Also, perform a restart on your tracker and keep an eye on its behavior.

Let me know how it goes.

[RobH2069]

Thanks for your message. I have always waited before running until the fitbit GPS says connected before running. I have even waited 10 seconds after pressing start. I have been running in a park with absolutely no cover at all. I have run under cloudless blue skies. This is not the problem. My phone's GPS seems to manage it effortlessly every time. When I am not doing exercise I am not measuring distance. In fact since my frustrations my fitbit is now in a drawer and I will probably sell it, since it has no purpose for me. I haven't tried a restart on the tracker. But since I can use Strava app on my phone and get precisely the accurate information I bought the fitbit for, I am not that interested. It only confuses matters when I get 2 sets of data for the same run, one accurate, the other fitbit's telling me I have run 4% further and 4% faster than in reality. I have given up with trying to resolve the inaccuracies manually, guessing my stride length. It is not worth the aggravation trying to use the fitbit. It is simply not up to the task. Thanks for trying to help but I'm afraid that your product is shoddy and is of no use to me. 

[AlejandraFitbit]

Thanks for getting back, @RobH2069.

I appreciate the feedback provided about the Charge 4 functionality, and I am sorry to hear that you are going to sell the unit. If in the future there's anything we can help you with, do not hesitate to post it.

Keep the stepping up! 🙂

[Hobbo]

I have just purchased the Fitbit charge 4 and I find the step counter to be very inaccurate.

I tested it by walking 20 steps and when I checked the count it says 36 steps.

That's almost double????

[nfrengle]

Your answer to this user was not particularly helpful. I bought a Fitbit Charge 4 for my girlfriend, and it has exactly the same issue: It records distance as about 4.6% further than actually run. That is compared to properly calculated distances and against three other known-accurate devices. It is consistently off. That amount of discrepancy is not acceptable. I am not, and my girlfriend is not, a professional athlete, and do not need it to be millimeter perfect, but it is, over the course of a run, hundreds of meters off. Every time. GPS does not, if being used, produce that much inaccuracy. So, it seems that your company is selling a product which does not have a properly working GPS functionality. There are consumer protection laws which protect consumers from such fraud. And that is what it is: You claim the product uses GPS, but then guesstimate based on stride length and the accelerometer. Completly unacceptable. I get that it isn't easy to do from an engineering standpoint. But here is the thing: If the product cannot consistently receive and process a GPS signal, then you cannot sell it as having GPS functionality. If it is just a matter of it taking rather a long time to get a GPS signal, then the messages on the watch saying it has acquired a signal are false, and need to be fixed to display only when it really has got a signal. In either case, you need to fix this, not explain that it is a feature not a bug. I had a Polar distance tracking watch 12 years ago that used an accelerometer to guess my distance. That's why I bought this one with GPS--5% off isn't really good enough. I am very frustrated, not least by your answers to a genuine problem, and will be taking this to the authorities in the UK, who really do take this sort of thing very seriously.

[LJM2021]

Did you find any solution to this? 

I'm going to request a full refund as I've just found out that all my runs have been incorrectly reflected on Fitibit's app. I have a Charge 4 and Strava shows lower distance, time and pace than my Fitbit. I've run mutiple tests and each time the Fitbit is out out.

I ran with a friend who uses Garmin and his Garmin, Strava and my Strava all showed the same. The only inaccurate data was from Fitibit which is either due to terrible GPS or more likely, due to their stupid algorithm that for some reason incorporates stride length. 

I specifically bought at GPS enabled sports watch to track GPS, if I knew it wasn't going to use the GPS, I would never have bought it.

It's disgusting tactics from Fitbit to falsely pump up numbers to make people think they're fitter than they are. Not to mention, the negative effect of having a much higher time in a compitition race due to Fitibit falsely showing your pace and time.

The more people that know about this the better. 

Very disappointed 

[Snoozin]

The Fitbit Charge 4 is WAY worse than useless!! Mine is brand new, and today it said I walked 5800 steps, yet I hardly left my couch all day. Every time I move my wrist, it added a whole bunch more steps! How can Fitbit possibly continue to sell such trash? I’m not using GPS. Where the heck is it getting this insane/impossible step count?

[Snoozin]

Yes! Mine says I walked 5800 steps today, when I never left my home, and mostly sat on the couch! I don’t even KNOW what percentage of “WRONG” that is! Every time I moved my arm or wrist, it added a whole bunch more steps! And when I sat perfectly still, it added a bunch more steps! What is the matter with these things and how can they get away with selling them?!?

[Sharona11]

I have used my Inspire 2 for about three days. Today I worked all day mostly sitting at my desk. I went for a 4km walk after work but apparently I have done 17000 steps and walked 10.9 km. What a joke. I wish I could do that. Rubbish!

[Snoozin]

The guy I talked to at Fitbit told me to do the "walk 100 steps, then check to see if that was accurately counted test," so I did, and it was pretty accurate, so he said it was working perfectly, there was no problem with it. When I continued to ask him about the thousands of other steps I didn't that that it counted, he implied that I was lying about all the extra steps. Said there was nothing to fix because it registered those 100 steps correctly! No reason to return it for a refund, as how was I going to prove I didn't walk all those other steps! Junk product, junk customer service. May I ask if anyone else in this thread has tried to get a refund?

[Sharona11]

It’s rubbish. I walked 17000 steps in one day apparently. How good is that !!! NOT. Very disappointed and they aren’t that cheap either.

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[haimaker]

Why do you give these generic replies EVERY time a customer reports inaccurate distance measured with GPS? I have looked at four threads tonight, each time the person has said they are using built-in GPS and it has accurately drawn their route but the distance is out. A did a 10k run two weeks ago and Fitbit Charge 4 showed my precise route and told me it was 11.2km. It meant I couldn’t submit the data for an organised event I had paid to enter. Please start answering the question: why are you mapping accurately and measuring inaccurately? Thank you.  

[jorie]

I'm also having this problem. I had a Charge 2 for years and had adjusted my stride length to compensate. I thought by upgrading to the Charge 4 with GPS I would finally get some accuracy. HA! I walk the same route every time and the mileage Fitbit records varies from 1.3 miles to 1.9 miles, depending on my pace. But, as others have said, it maps the route (mostly--what's with the tiny gap between the start and end points???) correctly. I just laugh to see the identical map with different distances underneath. Seems ridiculous that they are still using stride length when GPS is "built in". Come on, Fitbit, fix this! I'm starting to doubt all my data and rethinking my 6 year loyalty.

[grahamm7]

I am a walker and use the Fitbit Charge 4 to track my walking distance. I am more interested in miles tracked by GPS than steps.  I used my Fitbit to track a 4 mile walk.  I ensured the FitBit was locked onto GPS before starting.  I have a Garmin Etrex20 walkers GPS and tracked on that.  At the end the Fitbit showed 4.84 miles.  The Garmin 4.25.  I then exported the TCX file from the Fitbit and the GPX from the Garmin. Converted the TCX to GPX.  Then compared the 2 tracks on my map app and the distances were then 4.21 and 4.13 much closer and much more accurate.  It appears to me that the displayed distance on the Fitbit face at the end of my walk (and perhaps for runners as well) is not reflecting what the GPS has accurately tracked.  Maybe FitBit should explain their alogrithms on the device.  It maybe that in using the track to display the distance on the device face they don't do it very accurately compared to taking the same track information (co-oridingates) and working out the distance accurately  Whether FitBit will take any notice of our feedback I don't know.  I do keep posting on the Forum in hope that Fitbit take notice and maybe improve their devices.

[CFactor73]

I've been having similar problems with my new Fitbit Versa 4. My first brisk long(ish) walk seemed to be accurate, in terms of distance covered. The next 2 walks seemed to be innaccurate. So I started used my Phone App alongside my Fibit to check for and compare distance (my Phone App has been pretty reliable, so was confident about making comparisons). It turns out that my Fitbit is out by whopping c.+25% on average i.e. instead of recording 4km, as my phone app was doing, it would be stating 5km. Is a huge discrepancy.

I'm generally happy with my Fitbit, buit this element is a let down, and makes we wonder how accurate the daily 'calorie burn' is, as a result.

Thoughts and guidance welcome.