Versa Clock faces from Fitbit labs needs improvement

[sygyzy]

I received my Versa on Friday and so far I like it, most of the time, but the watchface experience is truly terrible. I come from two Pebble watches, first and second generation Android Wear (Wear OS) watches, Motorola MOTOACTV, and other smartwatches so I have seen different implementations. I am not sure how Pebble designers and engineers could be satisfied with how they implemented things.

There is no sorting or ranking of watch faces at all. You get a few categories like Made by Fitbit, Fitbit Labs, Digital, Analog. If you click into something like Digital, you will see dozens, if not hundreds of watchfaces. They are not even in alphabetical order. There is no sense in how they are organized. You can't tell which watches are brand new and which have been around for a while and may have bugs or are outdated. You also don't know by glancing which watches are free and which are paid. Oftentimes, the designer will hide the pricing information "beneath the fold" so you have to expand the description to figure out it costs money.

There's no searching or filtering.  If you know the name of a watchface, you can't search for it. You have to scroll a randomly sorted giant list of watchfaces and try to find it.

Even with a full WiFi signal AND cellular signal, every action in the store results in a lost connection (either to the watch or the Internet) half the time. I wish I could post a video of a session browsing and selecting watchfaces. It takes twice as long as it should because every other step is a lost connection. When you click on a watchface to install, there's a pink progress bar that just animates back and forth, so it's not really a progress bar; it's more like a "waiting" bar. When it finishes animating, then it kind of acts like a progress bar but for some reason, half the watch installs fail 40% of the way through so you have to keep repeating the steps.

There is no way to download or save the watchface to your phone or the Versa so there's no way to quickly switch faces without your phone AND an internet connection. This morning, a watchface I paid for "expired" (remember, I paid and unlocked it). When this happens, your Versa is at the mercy of the dev. This dev luckily allowed the watchface to show the time, but the rest of it was basically an ad, telling me that the watch was expired. No big deal, let me go into the app and switch to another face. Wait, I can't. "Lost connection to the Versa"..."No internet connection". It took me about an hour of repeatedly trying to get ANY watchface on my Versa so I could use the watch and not get blocked by the expired watchface. This is a terrible user experience. Even if I didn't pay for a watchface, when it expires, I shouldn't be blocked from using my $200 watch. I can choose from and switch to dozens of watchfaces on Wear OS and Pebble with no issues. 

I hope Fitbit does something to improve the watchface experience.

1. Allow for offline storage and selection of faces on the phone and the Versa itself
2. Add more categories to the face browser
3. Allow for filtering
4. Have meaningful rankings or sorting (most popular downloads, highest rated)
5. Seperate out free and paid watch faces or visually indicate which faces are paid, in a way that can be seen at a glance
6. Fix stability issues with the watchface selection "app" between it and the watch and the internet
7. Don't allow "expired" watchfaces from hijacking the watch. If you don't allow us to switch to any watchface we want on the Versa, at least allow us to store the default watchface so we can switch to something free and functional.

Moderator Edit: Updated Subject For Clarity

[RobertoME]

Hi there @sygyzy, nice to see you around and great feedback you have provided. I really appreciate your review regarding the clock faces and how are they organized.

Regarding the troubles you mentioned with the clock faces, it might be related to some issues about the functionality we have found, including syncing, setup/firmware updates, and downloading apps/clock faces from the App Gallery. Rest assure we are working to resolve this quickly.

About the clock faces that may present some bugs, these apps and clock faces are experimental in nature, so you might experience minor issues, and they might be available for a limited time. Note that this are made by independent developers not affiliated to Fitbit. If you find that a Clock face or app from the Fitbit labs is presenting issues or need improvement since it's expiring,  feel free to contact the owner of the clock face to provide feedback. To do this use this form.

Now, I found your feedback very constructive, for the same reason I would like to invite you to visit  our Feature Suggestion board and share your insight. I went ahead and I found some ideas similar to the one you have brought to my attention, so it would be nice to have your support by commenting and voting for those ideas.

- Remember Recently Used Clock Faces in favorite tab Ionic/Versa

- Add filter for new and/or updated to Clocks and Apps Gallery

If there other suggestion you want to share, feel free to post you own, but individually so we can keep track of the feedback.

See you later and stay awesome!

[michel999]

For me: especially separate the paid ones and the unpaid ones.

Terrible idea that you have to pay 1 or 2 dollar for something like this, after only 12 hours of checking it out

[sygyzy]

@michel999 I agree. I actually don't mind that there are devs who are charging for watchfaces but I shouldn't have to spend so much time investigating which are paid and which are free.

[cj179]

The Jarvis clockface got me today!  I saw a notice that Jarvis 2.0 had arrived.  It evidently changed my display to something less than I preferred.  So stupid me, thinking that purchasing the new would actually allow me to return it to it's original state, bought it to find out that it did nothing of the sort.  That Clock Face is now useless to me.  The temperature is unable to show me the 'feels like' any longer.  I really don't know how to get back to the way it was.  I'm fine leaving the money with the developer on the hopes that they will actually fix what the have, to put it lightly, destroyed!  I was pretty happy with it previously and not on the hunt to find something as good ...

[Mothrasue]

Cj179, I feel your pain!!  Ugh to anyone else out there—  do NOT update the clock face Flat Jarvis!  I did without reading the update details and it ruined what was a perfect clock face for me.  It’s the only one I’ve used for the whole month I’ve had my Versa, and now I can’t use it anymore because it’s ugly, the weather “feels like” doesn’t work anymore, and I definitely don’t want to pay just to keep it.  I’m using another clock face now, can’t remember the name, and it’s pretty nice, has more info than Flat Jarvis, but isn’t as good looking as the original. Also doesn’t have the nice feature where you can tap it to keep the screen on.  😞

[Tidalwave]

Hey @cj179 and @Mothrasue,

First of all a brief introduction, we are the developers of both Tesla X and Flat Jarvis clockfaces.

Flat Jarvis 2.0 is the evolution of Flat Jarvis. Fitbit SDK is constantly evolving and we are working daily to keep our clockfaces up-to-date with it to provide better performance, stability and new features to our users.

We recommend users to update their clockfaces constantly as basically we will not support the old versions anymore, which means that eventually they can simple stop working / malfunction, something that we will not let happen in the newest versions.

Design-wise it's essentialy the same clock but now we allow users to configure the colours, arcs, indicators and everything else. The only thing that has changed from the previous version that users cannot customize for the time being is the font size/family, but we are already working on a new update that will enable them to do so.

After the update we are constantly receiving feedbacks from our users, and we can say that 90% of them are positive. Unfortunately it's impossible to please everyone.

Keep in mind also that we are independent developers (not affiliated with Fitbit by any means) and maintaining a clockface with this level of quality takes a lot of effort. The weather forecast for example is a service that is not provided by Fitbit SDK and developers that provide this feature have to pay for third party services in order to deliver that to users, making no sense in the long run to offer this feature for free.

Flat Jarvis was getting a considerable number of daily users and consequently we have had an increase in monthly fees for servers/databases upkeep and the time that we have to invest in this.

Users can still use Flat Jarvis for free if they want, so if you don't want to pay it's your own choice. Just keep in mind that you will miss some key features that we have planned / we will prioritize the suggestions from our paid users.

Nevertheless, if you appreciate our work, we guarantee that it's worth to support us as you will encourage us to continue constantly improving the clockface that you like and enabling us to spend more of our free time building new ones.

If you have already supported us and found a problem / has any suggestion, just send us an email at tidalwave@gmail.com

Best regards,
Tidalwave Team

[cj179]

Tidalwave Team,

Your response beat my update to my previously posted message.  As of yesterday, my 2.0 clockface again began to malfunction.  As I went to try to resolve the issue I was pleasantly surprised that the upgraded clockface once again displayed weather correctly and responded quickly to my configuration changes.  I understand that there are yet to be many other configuration parameters as that is a slow process on any count.  I am happy to support, at a reasonable price, the development of something I find of value.  At this point I am comfortable with the one-time cost of the update.  My kudos to the developers as this is a pretty nice clock face.  Build on!

[ThinRedLine]

Tidalwave; I have been trying hard to contact you as I've downloaded and used the Tesla X face and would like to customise it. Links on the watch notes go nowhere, to blank pages or give a 404 error. I'd actually like to pay, but I noticed that the paypal page is not secure, and do not want to take the chance. How do we get in contact with you otherwise?

I also agree with the above comments about the clock face setup - but I'd also like to see them on my PC, rather than scrolling endlessly through my phone. Detail would be good!

[Tidalwave]

Hey @ThinRedLine,

You can contact us through Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, this forum or even our email.

But thanks for letting us know that the links are not working, we will address this issue.

What do you mean when you say that paypal page is not secure? Paypal is a third party service that opens a new browser window and access their servers through SSL so you should not worry about it.

As for our website, there are two layers in place. We have a non-SSL simple page that wraps our SSL protected server, we couldn't use Fitbit Oauth2 otherwise, so don't worry as it's safe indeed.

If you have any concerns/other questions just contact us through the provided methods.

Have a great day!

[owaisidris]

Allow to mark favorite or shortlist watch face.
Offline capability to change watchface. Only thing I am missing after migrating from WearOS.