Understanding Subscription Activity Frequency

[LifeOmic-Dev]

We are working on transition over to subscriptions to better handle user updates.  I have monitored the webhooks from our dev account and noticed some interesting behavior that I'd like to see clarified.

• Over the course of the day, I saw activity updates arriving every half hour.  It seems like the mobile tracker in my phone was recording something that counted as an "activity" update and this was eventually ending up on the feed.  How frequently should we expect to see updates from automatic events like these?  My worry is that this will cause excessive requests on our part to figure out if a new exercise was recorded, which is the primary reason for subscribing to activities.
• When I powered up an old Inspire HR, it synced and put 25 days of activity on the activity feed.  This one webhook update was able to trip rate limiting for my user due to the number of requests made per-day.  While this does require some action on our part, how common would it be to receive nearly a month's work of updates via a subscription? 

[JohnFitbit · Accepted solution]

Hi @LifeOmic-Dev,

Happy to provide some clarification here.

• The activity collection does not only notify you if a new exercise was logged, but any change in general regarding activity (steps, calories, floors, distance). For example, You can receive a notification from a user who simply took a few steps to the kitchen because their step count changed since the last time they synced. As long as there is a change to the collection, you can see notifications as early as every 15 minutes through background sync (as long as the app is running in the background).
• Devices like the Inspire HR can store 7 days worth of intraday data (minute by minute totals) and 30 days worth of daily summary totals. So if the Inspire HR had not synced in 25 days, it will sync all of the daily totals it last recorded up to the date you powered up the device and synced. Any unsynced intraday data after 7 days and/or daily summary totals after 30 days will be purged from the device.

I can see your concerns with receiving an abundance of notifications for these instances, and it has been expressed by a few in the Community. We asked one of the early reporters to create a feature suggestions post to improve this feature here: https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/Web-API-Notification-collection-for-Exercise-Fit...

Please give it an upvote if you agree with the idea and it will help build a case for implementing this feature.

[LifeOmic-Dev]

Thanks for your response, @JohnFitbit!  That feature perfectly captures a functionality that would alleviate our concerns about unnecessary requests and potential rate limiting.  I have upvoted it and strongly hope it is considered.

[JohnFitbit]

No worries @LifeOmic-Dev 

I'll also follow up with our product teams to see if we can revisit this since interest has grown for it since last year.

[niallmccune]

Hi,

I would also like to ask about the status of this feature request. Specifically, as the webhook notification contains so little information, a further call to the API has to be made to see that there are no logged activities to download. With a growing number of users, numerous redundant calls have to be made. Has there been any more discussion about improving this feature?