I use my fitbit charge 5 for hiking. Since acquiring the fitbit in June 2022, several GPS related issues have surfaced.
1. The built-in GPS is extremely unreliable - or weak, even with light to moderate forest (tree cover) in dry conditions. In "exercise mode", the dreaded red outline indicating a loss of GPS pops up very quickly. Personally, this makes the built-in GPS circuitry completely unusable.
2. Using the "Phone" configuration on the fitbit is better but a loss of signal (red outline) still occurs even when my phone is in a shirt pocket, and the phone screen is on showing the fitbit app. Attempts to investigate this situation led to running either Google Maps or another GPS app on the phone just to confirm that the GPS satellite data was present and strong. I could also sync the fitbit with my phone, so know that bluetooth was also working. Something is causing the "exercise mode" to think that the GPS is unavailable when, in fact, it is present and strong.
3. Once "exercise mode" thinks GPS is unavailable, it never recovers. Yesterday, I was about one hour into a 2 hour hike when the "loss of signal" icon appeared and the fitbit vibrated to alert me. I continued hiking -- through wide open meadowland -- and GPS was never re-established. This seems a genuine bug.
What have I tried to investigate/recover from this situation?
- wake up cell phone and confirm it is still syncs with the fitbit. NOTE: the phone was running the fitbit app in the foreground during the entire hike (except briefly as noted below).
- Briefly run Google Maps or GPS Test to check GPS signal strength where the problem occurred
- Exit the "exercise mode" and start again. This usually works, but is disruptive due to the exercise being split into multiple datasets (statistics, gps map, etc.)
- Restart the fitbit. Usually works, but also disrupts the statistics for this hike
- Restart the fitbit app on my phone. Usually no impact at all
- Restart (reboot) my phone. No impact at all.
My opinion is that there may be two issues (or bugs) present. First is the erroneous "loss of signal" in the "exercise mode" which should never have happened. Second, is the fact that once a signal is deemed lost, there is never an attempt to regain it.
Caveat: During my most recent experience with this problem, the GPS (location) permission for the fitbit app was set to "Allow only while using the app", which I think means when the fitbit app is running in the foreground, that is, when the app is visible on the phone's screen. However, given that during the critical parts of the hike, the fitbit app was always running in the foreground, this should be equivalent to a location permission of "Allow all the time".
What are my devices?
- fitbit charge 5 running firmware 57.20001.171.50
- Samsung A53 running android 12 and fitbit app version 3.71.fitbit-mobile-3 7 1 4 1 0 3 1 - 4 8 7 3 3 6 8 7 1
