TLDR: did all the "recommendations" before calling service, got the standard "you're out of warranty, but I'm bending the rules and here's a discount code for your next purchase". When parties all around know this is from a bad update that should be rolled back.
Just got off the phone with the Customer Service regarding this issue, so I don't need a response from Google or Fitbit. The CSA on the other end was doing their job and did it as well as they can for reading a script and not being allowed to deviate. That said, as a customer of Fitbit since 2014 (or thereabouts) I am moving on and will never purchase another Fitbit product. Their planned obsolescence and their developers just throwing code into updates that clearly hasn't been tested beyond the bare minimum for crashing a system and driving battery failure has been evident over and over in the community posts that pop up within a month of each the latest updates. My patience has run dry.
The actual problem: I was exercising, and on my drive home noticed my watch started repeatedly vibrating. The screen was blank with intermittent streaks of light that did not appear to have a pattern. Took my watch off, noticed no green light for heart rate, etc on the back. Once home I attached it to the charger and watched it cycle over and over again through the reboot phase, so I took it off the charger, used high-grade rubbing alcohol to clean all the pins and connectors, dried, then recleaned with electronics contact cleaner and let air dry. Set about reattaching the charger, and watched it reboot repeatedly again before doing a forced reboot, where it supposedly settled in for a charge. However, I watched the battery dance from 4% to 78%, then down to 32% before settling on 18%. It would only charge to 99% and then would die in under an hour once removed from the actual charger.
We already have a power conditioner on our main conduit into the house, so spikes can't damage the electronics. We changed out the wall wart, multiple tries to charge with each successive charger and cleaning pins in between. We even have a wire tester to make sure there are no broken wires in the charger. Still batting zero. From there I made the decision to do a factory reset of my Charge 5 and then did a second hard reset along with deleting the app and fully reinstalling.
Use-wise, I have had my tracker since 2022, I have watched the battery slowly drain from needing a charge every 10 days down to every 5. I'm okay with charging every 5 days. But when I set everything for minimal screen time, including GPS off and basic power-saver mode, and suddenly the battery goes from lasting 5 days to not even an hour; that points to updates and someone pushing a broken code. My watch did a forced update recently and the last two updates I have seen a noticeable drop in battery life.
Early on among all of this we reset the watch face because the watch face wouldn't load, only the intermittent blips across the screen until we reset it to the original face.
I've dealt with a LOT of bricked products, some my fault, many lack of testing on the devs part and it just being a simple line of code that needed altered. Honestly, I can no longer buy into a company that does their testing on gen pop rather than taking the actual time to do **it right. Even the simplest answer of making batteries accessible, should have been on the table from the beginning and again with each subsequent watch/tracker.
You're part of a big company Fitbit with deep pockets. You should DO BETTER.
