Issues with Fitbit Android App closing and not being available to the device

[gitanoco]

I'm running a versa and Pixel 2xl on Android 10 and a custom watchface that fetches and sends data back and forth from the device to the phone every 5 minutes.

This latest 3.12 version of the phone fitbit app is doing odd things.  About every 20 minutes or so my watch looses connection to the phone and won't reconnect UNLESS I go onto the phone and manually fire up the fitbit app, then everything connects again.  

I've checked, rechecked, triple checked all the in-app settings in terms of having "always connected" enabled and "all day sync" enabled.  Although I'm not actually sure what these settings do or how they work.

Seems like there used to be an option to have a static notification always present on the android status bar but I don't see that anymore. 

I've also made sure that the fitbit app is not battery optimized.  I can't find any settings in android to ensure that the app is allowed to run in the background... or for how long.

Is anyone else experiencing this?  And/or have advice how to workaround or fix?

[Gondwana]

It probably won't help, and you're probably already doing it, but try run_background permission and companion wakeInterval.

[gitanoco]

Hi Catplace.  I've got run_background checked in the package.json.

For wakeInterval... I've tried that.  I've actually got two versions of the watchface where one only uses file transfer / wakeinterval and that one I've never been able to get to update the data more than about every 10+ minutes.  Nothing I've tried seems to actually wake the companion at the 5 minute interval using the wakinterval property (set to 5 minutes).

My current code uses messaging to send data to the phone and file transfer to go from phone to the versa.  That one honors the 5 minute "setinterval" in the app code but seems to not be able to keep the companion from being killed by Android... at least that seems to be what is going on.

[Gondwana]

Would you be willing to post a synopsis or link here? Fitbit staff are definitely interested in comms reliability problems post the SDK 4 rollout. I guess this may not be seen as a comms problem so much as a keeping-alive problem, but they're intimately related.

[GeekBit]

I am also experiencing communication issues between my Fitbit Ionic (27.70.7.14) and the Fitbit App (3.12.1).
I have two Fitbit apps requring internet access and sometimes they work like a charm. Then a couple of hours later the apps can't connect to my phone anymore. I am using a Huawei P30 Pro with Android 9.1.0
I have also installed the Fitbit SDK Bart application to make sure the communication issues aren't related to my code. But the when my apps can't communicate the Bart app wont be able to communicate either (Saying "Please check connection to phone and Fitbit App").
It is hard for me to troubleshoot these communication issues.

I also would like to add some functions to my clockface to get data from the internet but as long as the communication is not stable I don't dare to do it because the users of my clockface probably will blame me as the developer when the data on the clockface is not updated.

Can someone from Fitbit comment on those issues?