Yeah, as much as I got frustrated with Ionic (before I returned it), there are other "players" in the mix here.
The driver system (mostly on Windows, but Android has more of a "layered system" now too; I'm not as familiar with the iOS model) has a series of drivers, that an app (such as the FitBit one) relies on.
The chipset (like Qualcomm and Broaodcomm, for example) typically create drivers, for their specific Bluetooth implementations, and release these to OEMs and IHVs, who use them to test and integrate Bluetooth, pretty much everywhere.
On top of that, many vendors have an "abstracted bluetooth stack driver", or similar, so that an app, like the FitBit one, only has to know a certain language (API sets) to talk to their device, regardless of the brand/make/model device you're using to do so.
Sometimes, as s/w and firmware developers do, bugs get introduced, into both sides (really all three, if you want to count the h/w as well), coming from someone who used to work on h/w and s/w "boundary" tests.
There are lot of places for things to go awry here, particularly in Bluetooth LE, which is still sort of "relatively young" technology.
All that aside though, Bluetooth has gotten a TON more stable than it was, say in the 90's, or even the 2000's, the bigger, gaping flaws have pretty much all been patched, and "known good code base" is used when embarking on many/most new revisions, to avoid reverting (not to mention most are down-level compatible).
There's also the issue with things like my BLE 5.0 chipset, on my desktop, which pretty has only failed a handful of times, syncing my old Charge, and Charge 2, and yet it really, really struggled with the Ionic.
The Ionic is likely using some of the newer protocol constructs, the "less tested" variety, in an attempt to become even more power-efficient, reliable, etc.
Sometimes it all lines up, all your stack is good, the app is good, and the device is good, and things just work, almost "magically".
When they don't though, it's tough, you end up trying to trace back through connection logs, reset a bunch of stuff, and the developers who are "fixing" these issues often don't have great access to a reproduction scenario, which can be crucial to determine a fix (post-mortem debugging is much beter, but still not the same).
You can also have 3rd party "filter drivers" and the like, say you have a special Bluetooth monitoring app, that installs a driver (it almost has to), and helps you diagnose BT issues. If it's driver has a bug, well, it's going to hose things, and there's very little the FB can do about it, other than trying to work with that vendor, provided they're even still around, and open to discussion.
Is the Ionic and the FB s/w modules that function with the new Ionic features buggy? Yep, at least in my opinion, and things like the music sync modules are ridiculously so, IMO, they've stepped back almost a couple of decades.
Hopefully, the problem isn't in some chipset module, on the Ionic, that's hard to fix, or basically impossible to fix, that part is hard to know, and FitBit is unlikely to be forthcoming about itl, the same way they tend to deny most of the "real problems", because it implies fault, and then it goes down a whole different path, of users demanding fixes to those reports, even though the problem might be (mostly) in modules that they don't even own/control.
I worked on some early USB tests, and there was a darn-good reason we called it "plug and pray", way back, when USB was about as stable as Bluetooth is today. USB is a lot easier to fix though, wireless is ALWAYS harder, you have latency issues, interference, how to handle "lost packet data", the whole bit, and BLE is harder still, becuase it has to do all this, and use a very small amount of battery, per-spec.
I'm not in a hurry to buy another Fitibt this time, my Charge2 is going to be my "staple", until I see some better post-release reviews, for whatever comes next.
Hopefully this sheds some light, on why some users see issues, while others are fine, why some setups "just work", while other "seemingly similar" systems fail so miserably, it has to the with the multi-layered design we've reached (for great reasons, it solves a TON of older computing problems), typically.
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