I had an issue with the GPS tracked activities using my Fitbit Sense and the maps looking a mess. This was supposed to have been escalated and I was supposed to receive an email with an update. In keeping with the truly awful levels of customer services and the outright lies we now receive, needless to say I have never been contacted. To be honest, I don't believe the advocate I dealt with (Alejandro) even bothered to escalate it. All he wanted to do was ruin my device by repeatedly trying to get me to carry out a factory reset when I was a 100% sure there was nothing wrong with my device. Given my wife's experience of doing this, in all probability such a reset would have killed a perfectly good device completely as it did hers.
Anyway, I have managed to diagnose the issue myself and it was an app issue, not a device issue (I guess Alejandro will need to update the scripts he follows and the templates he pastes into Live Chats). On your smartphone, if you go into its settings (not the Fitbit settings but your phone settings), locate apps and then click on the Fitbit one, open up permissions. One of the permissions is location. I had it set to "allow only while using the app" as it was none of Fitbit's business where I was when I was not using the app. However, this was what was causing the map issues. When I changed it to "allow all the time" the maps displayed correctly.
I naively thought that because my Fitbit Sense has an inbuilt GPS, it was that that recorded all my activity and location. It certainly used to so something has changed in the background. However, it seems that whilst Strava can still use this data to accurately produce a map of my activities, Fitbit's app cannot anymore unless the location permission is set to "allow all the time".
Now all I do is leave the permission set to "allow only while using the app" until just before I go for a walk, when I change it to "allow all the time". As soon as I complete my walk I just switch it back. It is a pain to have to keep doing this but if that's what it takes to get accurate maps and Fitbit not being able to monitor my every move then so be it.
