RESOLVED: Tracked periods were deleted (Android)

[AlessFitbit]

Fitbit Update: 2/25/19

Hi, everyone!

Today we have released the Fitbit for Android app version - 2.88 to all users. This app version contains the fix for period data being deleted. Please update to this version as soon as you can.

In addition, I would like to make it clear that any data that may have disappeared will not re-appear after updating to this new app version. We hope this sets you all back on track and we're super thankful for your patience while this was investigated.

Now that a fix has been released, I'm going to close this thread from further comments. If you come across this issue in the future or have any new issue to report we ask that you create a new topic to let us know.

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Fitbit Update: 1/22/19

Hey all!

We've noticed this issue has re-emerged this month. Thanks for those who have reported on here and contributed to this thread. The problem has been escalated for investigation. 

We appreciate your help and will update everyone when we have more info. Please stay tuned and we thank you for your patience! 

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Fitbit Update: 10/26/18

Hi everyone!

A new version of the Fitbit Android app (2.82) was released yesterday to 10% of Android users that should resolve this issue. We anticipate it will roll out to 100% soon. If you haven't received the update yet, please stay tuned. Thanks again for your patience and reports!

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Fitbit Update: 10/12/18

Hey folks! 

Our team is still investigating the root cause of this issue. We're really sorry for any inconvenience this has caused and are working towards a long-term resolution. I really appreciate everyone's feedback and reports. I'll keep you all updated when more information is available. 

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Fitbit Update: 7/12/18

Hi, everyone!

Thanks so much for jumping in here to report your Female health data has disappeared in the Fitbit for Android app. Our team is aware of the issue and will investigate the cause. I noticed many more reports of this coming in starting yesterday 7/11. 

When I have more information or updates, I'll announce them here. Thanks for your cooperation! 

[Amy206]

Hi @MarreFitbit,

I was thinking about it and deleted the app then re-installed it with my same account and it worked!!! The app was working perfectly, everything, even including the Female Health Tracker!!! 

[MarreFitbit]

Hi there @Amy206, thanks for jumping in here! I'm glad to hear that after uninstalling and reinstalling the Fitbit app it worked for you!

Don't hesitate to let me know if you need further assistance! 

[Ar1z0nagrl]

Please don't count on reinstalling fixing it! I've done this only to have everything delete again 3mo later.

[MarreFitbit]

Hi there @Ar1z0nagrl, thanks for jumping in here! Sorry to hear that your data is gone after uninstalling and reinstalling your Fitbit app. Are you still having inconveniences with your periods logged? 

Keep me posted! 

[FRMGRL2]

Still frustration.
Logged last 2 months, left app and came back... gone.
Dear Fitbit, please quit trying and just remove option. False hope is
not hope at all.

[Glencky]

Yep. Anyone who's new to this thread and thinks uninstalling and reinstalling, or installing the latest update, or any of the trite nonsense Fitbit is telling us, is deluded. It will not work permanently, you will simply start tracking again and then lose all your important medical data - AGAIN. It's a waste of time. They don't have it working, they're not interested in prioritising it - they should just withdraw it and stop falsely promoting a service they're not interested in getting working.

to the moderators/ administrators who have to front off this nonsense - this isn't a dig at any of you. This is a view from somebody personally involved in software development on a large scale elsewhere who can see all the signs that this is not something Fitbit is interested in prioritising. There's no way I'd trust them with my health data again beyond steps.

[DodoMitchell]

Could it be that Fiybit doesn't have enough women on staff to understand how important this information is?  Should this conversation be taken to a more public venue?

[DodoMitchell]

Could it be that Fiybit doesn't have enough women on staff to understand how important this information is?  Should this conversation be taken to a more public venue?

Taking the option away is definitely better than promising something that they really are not interested in fixing.

[Glencky]

@DodoMitchellyes, I agree with you.

I have considered the same point - whether they have enough women involved. It's not even about 'on staff' but about 'involved in the actual development work' (you can have a lot of women on staff but not actually involved in the development - managerial and development roles are both overwhelmingly dominated by men whereas e.g. customer facing roles are dominated by women. So even if Fitbit had a 50/50 gender split 'on staff' I'd be interested to know how many of them actually work in roles where they can influence development, and how many of THOSE actually use this functionality on Android. I also wonder if they have actually bothered doing proper customer insight, and if they have, have they bothered doing it *over a decent length of time*. A key part of customer insight should be monitoring a forum like this, but you note there are no product owners or similar contributing here, just front line people passing messages along (which are apparently going into a void of 'don't care'). By definition, to really understand what women want and need, you need to listen to women. And you need to do that over a length of time that is compatible with noticing medium to long term trends for something which happens on a monthly cycle. This is different to minute-by-minute step counts and their processes from insight to deveopment to testing need to take that into account or they will neer understand what is needed or, when it goes wrong, how it is going wrong.

They have clearly made a couple of half-arsed attempts at fixing this which don't actually work for a large chunk of users. Twice now we've read it's been fixed (but obviously my previously input data has gone - how can that even be? How can the data I input be lost? what kind of shoddy half-arsed solution is it they have in the background that it actually loses users' data? not being able to view or access it maybe, but they implement a fix and the data stays lost? WTF? that's not normal!) and I've sighed and started the process again and X weeks or months later the data is lost again. The whole point is to be able to observe trends and developments over time, it's a waste of my life to invest any time or energy in this functionality if I'm going to have to keep starting again from scratch. So I won't use Fitbit for this any more, and their attitude over it (and the shoddiness of their devices in recent years) has me ready to jump to an alternative altogether.

And on 'whether the conversation should be taken elsewhere', yes, I'd love it to be. I think this is just one more example of how women's health is poorly understood in male dominated industries and poorly prioritised. Which I think is probably pretty much the opposite of what Fitbit was trying to achieve Own goal, Fitbit. Own goal.

[Ar1z0nagrl]

Thank you Glencky...that pretty much sums up my own thoughts and feelings from my own experience in software development.

This is basically a non-issue for them, and the moderators, though they are trying to calm the waters by letting us know that Fitbit knows about this and is working on it, Fitbit's non-action is speaking loud and clear.

As my own Ionic battery gets closer to having to charge every other day (annoying, as it is only a year old), I'll be looking at replacing and leaving the Fitbit family. Either fix it - or remove it. 

[Glencky]

@Ar1z0nagrldepressing, isn't it? I really wanted this to work, but instead of being about women's empowerment, it's just another example of women's needs being overlooked. Fitbit benefited from being if not first to marker. then first to mass-market with their devices and a great UX. But the build quality's now rubbish (I don't care if you replace them within warranty. I want them to last longer than the warranty!) and once the software starts being unreliable too... back to Garmin, I suspect, whose sports devices don't fall apart due to sweat!

But on another note, if you really are an 'Arizona girl' then I'm jealous! I'm from the UK but love Arizona - been a few times (national parks trips, inc Grand Canyon). A great place to get your steps in, for sure!

[YojanaFitbit]

Hi my dear friends! Thanks for all the details that you've posted.

@FRMGRL2  Thanks for letting us know this information, sorry about this. We've escalated it to higher department and we're currently waiting for a resolution.

Thanks @Glencky, I really appreciate the time you took to post your feedback. Sorry for the inconvenience! We'll let you now as soon as we get more details about it. 

@DodoMitchell We don't want to create frustration in our users and we really appreciate your comments, at this moment we don't have more information on what happened with this features but we're working really hard on solve it.

@Ar1z0nagrl thanks for sharing your feedback. About your Ionic, you can check the information in this thread they are talking about the same topic. This article might help too.  

I'll be around in case that you have questions. 

[Etul]

The Charge 3 is the first Fitbit product I have bought, and I am extremely unimpressed by the lack of effort that has been put into the female health tracker. It's not the main reason I got the Charge 3, but my initial attempts to explore this feature have been extremely irritating.

Every. Single. Time. I click on the tile, and it treats me as if I have never accessed the feature before. Hi, let's explain how this feature works. Click through several pages of seemingly unavoidable explanation that I have sat through dozens of times before. Then back to a completely blank calendar despite having tried to log data on it dozens of times before. I log a symptom and hit save. Then I select a different calendar day and the dot on the calendar for the logged symptom vanishes. The information is gone when I go back and select the original day.

Fitbit is clearly capable of persisting other personal data, so why not this? How is it possible to market a feature that does not work at all, with zero effort being put towards fixing it? Why not just add a new tile called 'Fly to the Moon' that does absolutely nothing and say the Fitbit supports that, too?

Again, as other people have noted, I'm not having a dig at the moderators here, I don't envy you for having to try and convince us we are being listened to when nothing is being done. However, perhaps you could suggest that if Fitbit is going to market features that don't work, they could market their next product as including the capability for users to fly to the moon.

[YojanaFitbit]

Hi @Etul welcome to the Forums! Thanks for sharing your thoughts about Fitbit product.

Sorry to hear that you're having issues with the Female Health Tracking information. We've escalated this issue but at this moment we don't have more details about it. We really appreciate the time you've taken to post your comment here, but I wanted to let you know that we're here to help you out with any question about Fitbit. If you need more help with other feature of your Charge 3 let us know.

See you around! 

[Renewal40]

I had lost all data in October and started over. Everything was fine until January when everything disappeared. I don't see an update so I don't know if I should use or not? I don't want to lose all the data again so I may just find a different app that has a back up feature. 

[Jdunford]

Mine are also deleting. And even though I said a 28 day cycle it's predicting a 90 day cycle.....

[slcathena]

I want to add my name to the list of people who are totally infuriated that this feature doesn't retain data.

I have endometriosis and one of the critical pieces of information I'm trying to track is my periods and symptoms. I was overjoyed when this feature came out because I'm not great at using a paper tracker. The first time my data was deleted I thought I'd done it wrong, the second time I was annoyed, but decided to give it one more chance. This is the third time all of my data is gone over the last 6 months.  It is totally infuriating to spend time tracking a serious medical condition, trying to get a handle on symptoms, when they occur and how to be proactive at managing it only to have them completely vanish.

I also just have to agree with all of the posters above that there seems to be zero sense of urgency on this on the part of Fitbit, which is a shame. I'll take that lack of concern under consideration the next time I buy a tracker.

[Renewal40]

So after reading more posts on this it has become pretty clear that this is not a priority for Fitbit. I'm going back to one of my old apps that tracked and backed up the data.  This option should just be removed.  Imagine the uproar if all your stair data was lost or all your sleep data? I'm sure Fitbit would be on top of that.  Dont promise things you can't provide the support for period.  Just remove this feature and stop wasting women's valuable time.   

[slcathena]

Renewal40, I downloaded a different tracker too. I'd love to have this work since it would make things easier, but I just can't trust that the data will be there when I need it, which is a shame. 

[YojanaFitbit]

Welcome to the Forums @Jdunford, @Renewal40 and @slcathena.

I really appreciate the time you took to place your feedback here. I'll pass this information to our team, this unexpected behavior is not happening with all users; but it has been already escalated to our team and they are working on finding a fix. Sorry for any inconvenience while we're working on this and thanks a million for your understanding. Thanks again for sharing this information.