Fitbit Charge 2: Tracking Activities with assisted GPS

[Icemonkey]

So I normally use my Fitbit Charge 2 around metro areas, Internet access is never a problem. Recently I went on a walk in the mountains, much to my surprise I could not start track my activity; that is the activity would start tracking just the steps but refused to connect to the phone for assisted GPS while there was no Internet. I didn't want it to sync the Fitbit to the Fitbit servers or anything like that,  I just wanted to leverage assisted GPS from the phone. Am I doing something wrong?

At 1 point I had momentary Internet access and I was able to start the activity on the charge 2 and even though I lost Internet access for the rest of the activity the activity was tracked from this point on. This is running a Fitbit Charge 2 on a OnePlus 5T (Android 9.0.3). This seems to suggest Internet access is a requirement to start activity tracking for GPS data.

Why do I need Internet access to start an activity and leverage assisted GPS from my phone? It has effectively rendered the Charge 2 useless outside of metro areas....

Edit: It doesn't mention requiring Internet access to begin tracking activities on the help article here: https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/2036/.

[AlvaroFitbit]

@Icemonkey Welcome to the Fitbit Community! It's great to have you here! Thank you for the inquiry. Internet is required so the app itself works as explained here. This is why using the Connected GPS requires internet access.

Let me know how it goes!

[Icemonkey]

It's going terrible because the device is useless. I really don't understand why if it has paired via Bluetooth and has access to the GPS why the device cannot pull the relevant data without internet.  The article you looked to is talking about Fitbit syncing, it does not mention connected GPS having an internet requirement. I don't need it to sync i need to just use the phones GPS which requires no internet connection to work.