Charge 4 - Not recording my walking minutes properly

[SunsetRunner]

This piece of crap watch used to work just fine, then one day it wouldn't record one of my two walks, then it started to go bad. I contacted the company and one of their so called tech people told me I needed to update my watch as it needed to be updated.  So I did that and it got even worse. Now I have to calculate everything myself and it still won't pick up my second walk and it also tells me I am under my walking minutes.  This is the same walk I have taken for many years. I had a charge two that after many years started to go haywire, I figured okay time to get a newer version, so I went with the Charge 4. What a piece of crap.  This is time consuming to have to do all the work that the watch used to do.

 Of course you get us indoctrinated to work out and keep moving and so when we do, you go and screw us all over.  Thanks FitBit and Google or whoever owns it now.,

Moderator edit:  updated subject for clarity

[JuanFitbit]

@SunsetRunner , Nice to see you here. Thank you for your message and for taking the time to contact Support. 

I assume that you are trying to use SmartTrack (automatic recognition) on your walks, right?

If so, there can be various reasons why your activities were not recorded or recognized correctly

.

For example, the activity is not fully recognized by your movement patterns.

You paused for more than 30 seconds during the first few minutes, so the tracker might "think" the exercise was over.

I recommend restarting your tracker and setting the start times for the activities differently. For example, set it to 10 minutes for a walk, 15 for a run, 20 for an outdoor bike ride, etc., and/or ignoring the activities you don't use.

You can find the instructions for this here.Can I change how my activities are tracked?

See you around. 

[SunsetRunner]

Ir used to be that on your watch face, you would scroll down and you would
see a choice of days usually set for 5 days of exercise. i would leave my
house and walk my usual route and I would do this twice a day. I did not
use the exercise part of the app because I would invariably forget to stop
it after I finished my walk, but the watch would still count it for
exercise for the day, plus, you could go on the computer and check your
cardio and carb burn and so on in this section. One Friday I did my usual
morning walk and everything was fine it showed all the info I looked for.
Then, when I did my afternoon walk it never showed that I had done my
walk. Soon after that it gave me very spotty info. I contacted someone on
your question. problem section and I was told to update my app which I did
then the whole thing went wrong.
I am all for keeping fit and love the fact that I had a form of help to
keep me going and moving, but I don't like having to calculate my miles and
pace and calories burned is something that I should have to start doing
when all of this had been done on the watch before. Ever since the update,
it has done other weird things which, I can't think of at the moment.
Thank you for your time, but I am just going to stop wearing the watch and
go about my day.

[cdwolf]

I've had two Charge devices before my Charge 4 and all of them auto-recognized activity just fine. I got my Charge 4 in Dec. 2020 thinking it would be good to get the newer features since I'd had my previous device for years. The charge 4 has never auto-recognized my activity, and when I manually log it, it doesn't use my actual stats to determine calorie burn, etc but uses some random number it has stored, which is also frustrating. 

I love Fitbit and have been loyal for many years, but these issues are driving me to reconsider my next device. Garmin seems to be doing a better job with their activity trackers. 

[cdwolf]

@JuanFitbit 

[JuanFitbit]

@cdwolf , Nice to see you here. Thank you for your message and feedback. 

Taking into consideration your description, do you have MobileTrack activated?

To check this, tap on your profile picture on the app.

If it's active you'll see it listed below your picture. 

Tap on it and use the trash can to remove it. 

If it was active, it may cause that the activities recognized by the tracker be overwritten by the data recorded by your phone and Fitbit app. 

Hope this helps.