Unreliable communication between device and companion

[mm22dl]

Hi all,

I've recently purchased an Ionic and started developing a simple app, which retrieves blood glucose (BG) data from a server and displays it on the watch. You can find all of it on my personal Github page: https://github.com/dleclercpro/SugarBit. The app works as follows:

1 - Every minute, the watch asks the companion for new BG data.

2 - The companion uses the Fetch API to retrieve a JSON file from a server, which contains BG data from the last 24-48 hours.

3 - Once fetched, the most recent BG (unknown to the device so far) are sent over to the watch, using the Messaging API.

Step 3 is where the problems originate from: messaging seems to be flaky and stops working at times. Apparently, the messaging channel closes on its own, and I have no idea why. I've tried all of the following: restarting the app, deinstalling/reinstalling the app, unpair and re-pair the watch with my smartphone (Huawei P30 Lite). That said, everything works smoothly in the simulator.

Are there BT issues in the Fitbit OS and if so, is a fix coming soon? I would really appreciate some feedback on this. Thanks!

David

[philvms]

It is known that the messaging API can be flaky at times. I had the same issue when developing my app. You should use the file transfer API as it is more stable.

[mm22dl]

As the market has plenty other smartwatches to offer, I am sending my Fitbit Ionic back and getting a device that has a decent communications layer. At that price point, I would have expected the Ionic to have its basics sorted out.

[artaud]

@mm22dl just out of curiosity, which watch would that be? I've written for a lot of watches and currently it's either decent battery life or decent comm stack. There's nothing that has both AFAIK....honestly it seems to me that Fitbit is coming close with their latest comm stack rewrite...

[mm22dl]

I went for the Galaxy Watch Active2 from Samsung. I am very pleased so far, and the comms (both Bluetooth and WiFi) have been 100% reliable since the beginning. Also, the dev environment is entirely web based, so it wasn't difficult to rewrite my app.