Last week, my fitibit stopped showing my notifications on my Pixel2, but for some critical apps only (Whatsapp, Messages, Phone, Calendar etc), co-incidentally I had performed an app update in the Play Store. After some fiddling I got to the bottom of the issue - it's an annoying fix but seems to be a root cause affecting most Pixel 2 users so I think this is important. Especially as more and more apps take advantage of the new alerting features in Android, this is going to become more and more common.
Firstly - to get an app to notify you on the Fitbit Ionic, it has less to do with opening that app and fiddling with the notification settings within the app. It's far more important to go into Android Settings, Apps & Notifications, find your app, then select the 'Notifications' sub-menu there for that app.
Secondly, if you are in that sub-menu, if you only set the app to notify you (with no sound), while you will get a notification on your phone you WON'T get notified on the Fitbit Ionic. Rather, if you set it to notify WITH sound, then and only then will you get notified on your Fitbit.
The reason why this is an issue more than previously as it seems that phone apps can now define notification behaviours for many different types of app events, rather than just one notification for the entire app. In my case, the app update from playstore changed some of my apps to this new flexible way of setting notifications.
For example, if you went into Android Settings, Whatsapp, App Notifications - then previously there was a general all in one notification setting to set. However, now there is a setting for Group Notifications as well as Message Notifications as well as Chat history backup and Critical app alerts etc .... So, you need to click on each notification type to take you to an 'Importance' menu. Set the importance of each of these notifications to atleast 'High Make sound' or "Make sound and pop up on screen" for any type of event you care about seeing on your Ionic, for Whatsapp and other apps and to no notification if you don't care.
I don't like this, it's a bit onerous - surely setting Importance to 'Medium No sound' should be enough .... but hey I'm not sure if it is a Fitbit issue or Android issue and anyway it all works and I can now be granular and more detailed with my app notifications within my own control rather than just randomly working.
Personally, as a long time smartwatch user - I haven't had ANY apps on my phone make any sound for sometime, so this is also kinda annoying. Luckily though, if you set the app to notify on phone with "silent" noise, then this still works (instead of notify with no sound). So, I've basically set my "default" sound for notifications to be silent and I've set my default phone ringtone to be a completely silent audio file.
