Customize frequency of sync (hourly, daily)

[MargieSC]

Hi, not sure if this has been mentioned or not but I think that a feature for 'timed syncing', or however you want to call it, should be added. For example, theres the all day sync- which kills both phone and tracker battery syncing every 15-20 mins-or whatever its set to. I think we should have a option, for the background/automatic syncing, where we can set our own time intervals for syncing, every hour or 2 hours etc. Or/and, an option that allows us to set times that we would want it to sync at - every day. Ex. Everyday at 6am / 1pm / 6pm. 

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[sophware]

As far as a sync being a sync, yes. One could also say a sync is a sync is a sync. ...but, there are significant differences between sync choices.

Battery savings matters. This is why turning off all-day sync is an option. To me and many othes, battery time is gold. Working on optimization can make the difference between having the ability to get help easily when you need it, or not.

Also, in the past, in multiple cases, all-day sync has led to abnormal, severe battery drain.

In addition to direct battery life issues, my suggestion means that people with all-day sync disabled don't have to open the app at all for syncs. The social and motivational aspects of the program work much better this way (e.g. general updates for friends, updates for challenges).

[Rich_Laue]

What your saying is that the app not just prevent a sync when the phone is not charging, but have the app initiate a sync when the phone is put inyo its charger. Maybe when this forum problem gets fixed you should edit your OP.

[sophware]

I changed "charging" to "phone charging" in two places, and added this:

Of course, like the default behavior of all-day sync, the while-charging (while phone is charging) sync would be automatic, and not require us to open the app.

[dRuEFFECT]

It's really sad that this isn't implemented yet. Your "social" features rely on users having up to date synched information, and most of the time, not all friends have had their data synced recently.

I just got my weekly status report email, and the last 5 days have shown up as BLANK because I don't manually open the Fitbit app. This is a POOR user experience. The syncing should be done automatically in the background, and "All Day Sync" is a meaningless feature unless you still actually open the app regularly. This needs to be fixed.

[justinbmiller]

I would love to see a feature where you could schedule a sync at a specific time of day. All day sync was using way too much battery power and I constantly forget to manually schedule the sync. Also, it's a little cumbersome to have to open the app every couple of days and manually go through it.  This will definitely help with my Weekly Progress Report standings. 😉 Thanks!

[jadedgamerx]

Scheduled sync for phone battery life.  It's really simple.  Please add it.  All day sync is rediculously battery hungry on iPhone.

[LittleDove]

I would love a feature to set it up for once a week. Let alone once a day. Due to the battery drain on my phone and fitbit i have the all day sync off. The nature of my job means i tend to forget to sync my fitbit in the evening. Ultimately id love to set up n auto sync for once a week so that the weekly emails arent pointless. When you havent synced your fitbit in 3 days. Its disappointing to see the emails. 

[justinbmiller]

@LittleDove, while they haven't implemented a fix for this yet, I have implemented a workaround that involves IFTTT. You could really do it with any app (Reminder, Calendar, etc.) but I just set a rule to text me to sync my app on Sunday evenings around 9:00PM. This gets my steps up to date for the email I receive on Monday. Definitely not a very elegant fix but it makes my emails look better 😉

[SunsetRunner]

I'm going to jump in here and say I agree with everyone's comments so far, but I noticed that the last one was almost a year ago and here I am asking for the same functionality. We all would really like to be able to set a sync time for our units to upload their data via our mobile phone to your servers, without it doing it every few minutes, all day long or requiring the user to manually do this, but rather have it be an automatic one, like everyday at 9:00 pm provided the unit can talk to the mobile phone. If it can't talk to the phone, then it'll wait until the next scheduled time.

[Tieske]

I would love this option, with the addition to set the syncing every 1 hour, 30 minutes, or after 1k of steps etc.

[kamdag]

The support team replaced by Blaze 5 times noting that the battery drained far too quickly.  Turning off all day sync solves it but i never remember to sync.  This thread has the solution and it really doesn't take that long to implement in the app, so why has it taken months and this still isn't a new feature?

[MargieSC]

@kamdag Taken months? I started this post in 2015! Crazy to think is been 2 years and nothing. A moderator even commented agreeing a few months after I posted it.. still nothing. 

[kamdag]

 @MargieSC do you know why this is marked as "Solved"? Maybe that's why they are ignoring it.

[MargieSC]

@kamdag No idea, sorry. 

[SunsetRunner]

Just bought a Charge 2 and I thought this would be awesome being able to schedule a sync time for example 2200 hrs each night etc too!

On the subject of sync does anyone know if you can just sync via the USB dongle with Win10 or do you have to sync with the app now and again also?

Am new to the fitness tracker area sorry.

[Molladu]

I currently have all day sync switched off as it causes my Blaze to sync to my phone a dozen or more times a day, drastically reducing battery life (of both the Blaze and my phone).

Turning off however means I have to remember to sync it manually, which sometimes I'll forget to do for several days or more. In some cases, I have lost data as I've not synced for longer than the Fitbit will retain information for.

The easy solution to this would be the ability to schedule sync times throughout the day so that it only ever syncs a set amount of times- for example 6am, 2pm and 10pm.

I can actually see this feature was suggested here several years ago:

https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/Custom-timed-Syncing/idi-p/885891#comments

A moderator even commented that it was a good idea but since then it has had no attention from Fitbit. I note that when opening it, it states "Solved" on the title of the tab - was it marked as resolved in error instead of escalated for development?

Anyway, I'm hoping that creating a new suggestion will get the ball rolling.

[foques]

How is this still not an option is beyond me. 

we need this!

[Sarahcrystal]

When would this update be available?  I hate charging both phone and tracker constantly for the drain constant syncing (when app is opened) puts on them. 

[SunsetRunner]

I was going to suggest this as well, but figured I'd upvote this one and comment on it to bring it to attention.

This feature seems like a no brainer to me.

[Kelemvor]

Well, I see this is 3+ years old and isn't a feature yet so I won't hold my breath but I'd love to see this as well.  I'd prefer to set syncing to certain times so that it wouldn't interfere with me listening to music in my car.  I'd love to be able to set specific times that the device should or shouldn't sync.  I know I drive to work at a certain time and I drive home at a certain time so I don't want it to connect to Bluetooth during those times.  Things like that.

[SunsetRunner]

I got my Fitbit Ionic this week to replace My Pebble Time Steel. So far so good but ..

I have disabled All Day Sync, as it was killing my phone battery as well as the 'Keep-Alive Widget' as well as 'Always Connected'.

Doing this has in no way affected notifications being sent to my watch,and my step data is being synced because I periodically launch the fitbit app on my phone manually during the day.

My Ionic battery and Phone battery are lasting really well (2 days on Pixel2 typically from a full charge, and my Ionic is at 55% after 4 days). So - this seems great and everything else like steps, exercise sync and notifications are all working well. 

However, this seems like a hack, can we not have sync a feature which can be set on schedule within the Fitbit app directly?

[MarcelBK]

Nice suggestion, thanks for sharing. We look forward to hearing what other community members think.

[evenbetternb]

There should be an option to automatically sync at some interval when the phone is plugged in and fully charged.

This would make it so the sleep data gets synced overnight, and speed up any initial sync that happens in the morning. Most people charge their phones overnight, and once the phone is fully charged, since it's still plugged in, the fitbit can sync with the phone without using up any of the phone's battery life.

Night Sync might be a good name for this feature.

I find that it is very annoying how long it takes to sync in the morning to review my sleep data, but I can't stomach using all-day-sync, because my phone's battery life is already low, and I would have to keep it on the charger nearly all day if I had all-day-sync enabled. I suppose that I could look at the tasker ideas, and see if I can come up with something like what I described here.

[Rich_Laue]

The sleep is only calculated on the Fitbit server after the first sync after the user has woken up. So a night sync will not help. 

[kamdag]

Night sync would still get your sleep from the previous night. Either way
we need an option to select WHEN to sync vs the all-day sync which drains
batteries. I really can't believe this simple feature still hasn't been
developed. Shame on Fitbit for their lack of support.