I purchased a Fitbit Charge 5 earlier this year & really appreciated the functionality of pushing notifications from some of the apps I use to my wrist. Notably, because the watch's Timer feature will only run a single countdown that has to be less than an hour (56 minutes & 59 seconds), I've been using a clock app (Samsung Clock) on my phone (a Samsung Galaxy) that was working great at vibrating my watch with a notification whenever a timer ended. This has been huge for me because I struggle with a neurological disability.
This stopped working a month or two ago (I don't recall the exact date). The timers would still go off on my phone, but there was no longer a notification that would show up on my Charge 5. I believe this happened around the same time that I was asked to change over my Fitbit account to a Google account (which I did) & the Fitbit app underwent significant changes. I didn't connect the two in my head at the time & just assumed I had done something I needed to fix.
Since that time, I've tried many different things -- resetting my tracker, resetting my phone, digging through & testing plenty of system + app settings, and even trying other clock apps (Google Clock also has the same issue) to no avail. I read through the forums to see that some other users have been experiencing similar difficulties & was hoping to find something that might have worked for them, but no such luck (few of the complaints about this even seem to have received replies).
I went through and tried all of the troubleshooting steps listed in this official guide. I even went so far as to buy a whole new Charge when I saw that the 6 was on sale, and just received it ~24 hours ago and went through the steps to replace my Charge 5 on the Fitbit App with it. It still has the exact same problem. This is pretty maddening, as I don't really see much point in upgrading from the 5 to the 6 as it seems like basically the same thing (an extra side button, & a few added software features that I'm never going to use) otherwise. That Google/Fitbit seem to have introduced these issues over the past several months and have still not resolved them, plus bringing them over into their newly launched product, is a rather significant black mark against my desire to remain within the ecosystem.
I'd really appreciate knowing if this is an issue that has been placed in the queue for things to be fixed, as right now I can't seem to see that there's any impetus for it at all (other than other posts by upset users). If I can't resolve it, I think I'm going to return my Charge 6 and stick with the 5 until I can afford a smartwatch from another company that will support the functionality that I need to cope with my disability.
