Versa 3 useless for swimming, nothing is ever fixed by fitbit

[SunsetRunner]

I've been swimming for a while now, and I'm really angry by what a pathetic effort this "tracker" brings to the table for swimming.

I have to count my own lengths as I'm swimming, because this thing just won't bother to display that information until after I get out. All it shows me is the time, but that's not useful at all for my distance goal every time I get in the pool!

Why do I have to count them myself? Isn't the purpose of strapping an expensive device to our wrists so that we don't have to?

I see in other posts this has been a complaint for LITERALLY YEARS!

I thought fitbit were supposed to be "leaders" in fitness trackers, but everything about this thing has done nothing but annoy me. It's not fit for purpose at all, to the point where I'm honestly amazed you get away with the claims you make when selling these things. It's full on daylight robbery.

The calorie tracking is not just a little vague - it's entirely inaccurate and unpredictable. The swim tracking is non-existent. Fitbit pay is a barely compatible joke I had to get a special account for. Notifications often don't bother coming through. The one app out of the pitiful selection available I wanted is Uber, and that has been broken for years also with constant reports about it from lots of people.

The one area I like is how long the battery lasts, though that's rather a moot point when wearing the thing is utterly pointless because I'm having to manually count and track all my own stats!

Fitbit clearly doesn't give a s***, and can't actually be bothered fixing any of the constantly reported issues I see on here.

I keep coming back here hoping for updates on any of the myriad of issues I continue to have with this thing, and it just gets worse as time goes on.

Everything I try and do with this watch is either outright broken, or lacking to the point where it's pathetic in comparison to every other device made by other companies.

[Turgi]

Sorry to say, but you are wrong. It doesn't track your laps until you're out of the water. It gives a  huge underestimation of the laps and the distance you've covered because it goes by GPS and not by sensing turns at the end of the laps. It is completely useless. You are right about people lamenting  this shortcoming for  at least one year, to no avail. I don't think I saw one single response from the company. The solution? To relinquish the device and move to a competitor. I hear that Garmin is a favorite.

[Rufous44]

Actuallt Fitbit, all Fitbit, don't use GPS to track distance at all, they rely on the turns to estimate the distance as laps multiplied by lenght.

Now the problem of Versa 3, as opposed to Sense but also the goold old Ionic, is that it lacks gyroscope and so it doesn't show laps (distance) in real time. Bear in mind that this is what the community found out because no moderator or Fitbit representative backed this hypotethesis but I'm fairly confident it's the reason.

So when you are swimming  with Versa 3 you have to wait to finish your swim, upload the session on your Fitbit app that via some post processing performed likely on the cloud (again, Fitbit is everything but transparent about it) try to estimates the turn and consequent distance. Granted, this kind of algorithm could be done on the fly in the watch itself but Fitbit smartwatches are really underpowered to perform such calculation in real time.

The result is that the distance is everything but precise. 

The point is that Versa 3 will never be able to receive an update for it (actually Fitbit is not even releasing updates to fix serious bugs).

You could buy a Sense but I heard it's not good as well despite the gyroscope or move to another more dedicated brand.

[Turgi]

Thank you for the  info. It was my guess that the tracking was by GPS, and I figured each pool lap being such a short distance, it  was under the resolution of the system. I never swim less than 3 km (120 laps), and invariably it shows that  alI I cover is exactly half that distance. I also don't rely on the calorie computation, which is probably an underestimation secondary to the distance underestimation. With my previous fitbit, the watch would vibrate every 10 laps. Big disappointment, and total disrespect of our community on the part of the company😡😡😡😡😡😡.

By the way, I saw someone  complaining that  the whatsapp messages didn't flash. Is there such a possibility at all? I think I did receive them on my previous model, on this one all I get  are the text messages.