Stats showing differently on IOS app, web and Challenges

[Barbotus]

I'm not really sure if this is an IOS App issue, a web dashboard issue, a database issue or a challenge issue. But there are times when different views of the theoretically same data show up very differently... in that loads of steps that are showing up in some places are not showing up in others. I'll try to explain.

I'm in a regular Weekwork Hustle challenge with 5 friends in three different time zones. Eastern, Central, Pacific. I get that when a challenge originates on the west coast that the first three hours on Sunday will not show up in the challenge results even though they show in my daily total.

Last night (Thursday) at 10:15ish I went out for a walk with everything showing consistently around 4,900 steps for the day and around 48,000 for the Workweek Hustle in total. I walked steadily for 3 hours at a reasonably consistent pace, and according to IOS App daily totals, logged a little over an additional 12,000 steps before midnight and another 10,000 after midnight. See phone screenshot below.

So far so good. But both the Weekwork Hustle and detailed daily totals missed a whole bunch of steps that I know that I took. See the detailed screen below. From where the green bars start a little after 10:00pm they should be fairly consistent from then until around 1:15am. But instead they either show minimal activity or none at all. During a time that I was definitely walking. 

Edit: I neglected to take a screenshot, but the Workweek Hustle totals showed around 57,000 at that time rather than the ~70,000 that it should have.

I noticed this when competitors in the challenge were passing me and increasing leads while I stayed the same even while walking. Around 11:45pm I started up the "Walk" exercise with GPS active on my Surge to see if that made any difference. It didn't seem to, but it does provide confirmation that I was up and walking around at that time... which shows in the daily totals but not in the challenge or in the daily detail. 

As you can see, I was up walking from 11:41 for 92 minutes and logged 10,800 steps. Almost none of which is reflected in the detailed bar chart above.

Is anyone else experiencing dropped steps in some places but not others? 

tl/dr: My summary daily steps appear accurate, but both detailed activity and challenges are missing gobs of steps that show up in summary. Seems to happen more frequently when challenge issued from a different time zone, but that may be coincidence. Why are my steps missing?   

[MarcoGFitbit]

Hello @Barbotus, I hope you're doing well, it's great to see you around.

When all challenge participants are not in the same time zone, it's possible that the step total will not update correctly and will not reflect the same amount in the challenge than in your daily total.

Additionally, if you're able to see a discrepancy between the total amount of steps on your online Dashboard and the Fitbit app, it's possible the information in the app is not updating correctly with our servers, in which case I would like to suggest the following:

• Force-close the app by double-tapping the home button on your phone and swipe up the app. 
• Log out from the app, restart your phone and log back in.

This will refresh the information so it can be shown correctly in the app.

I hope this can be helpful, give it a try and keep me posted in case you need anything else! 

[Barbotus]

Thanks for the response. Did all that. Restarted phone app, force restarted Surge. No additional information on the FitBit displays.

Other than obvious timezone discrepancies (I fully understand that if a challenge starts at 3:00AM EST on Monday that steps recorded from 12:00AM EST to 2:59 EST will show up in my daily totals but will not show up in Challenge total) why would there be issues?

And just to be clear, my summary daily step total is consistent from Surge to IOS to Web Dashboard. It is in the daily detail activity database/graphs that steps are not recorded correctly, and this appears to govern what is reported for the challenge.

It's not the end of the world, but the when a ton of steps obviously go missing it's both annoying a frustrating. 

[Barbotus]

Now that I've looked a little deeper, it appears that the discrepancies that I'm noting may have been highlighted in previous developer forum posts as discrepancies between intra-day and summary totals. And that in some cases (noted possibly as FitBit low memory or low battery conditions) that intra-day data could be purged from the FitBit device prior to synching with the IOS app.

That doesn't quite add up, as it seems very odd that intra-day data would be retained from 10:15 to 11:00pm, generally purged from 11:00-11:30, available from 11:30-11:49 and then purged from 11:50-some time after midnight.

Seems more likely that there was some error in writing the initial data, and that once 0 was recorded for the intra-day intervals that any subsequent synching will not over-write. Which, if this is the case, is a problem. 

[MarcoGFitbit]

Hello @Barbotus, I hope you're having a great day, thanks for taking the time to reply! 

We've received similar reports, and I will make sure to forward your information to our team. While we don't have a timeline for resolution, we will continue to investigate these discrepancies.

Thanks for reporting this. In the meantime, if there's anything else I can do for you, please feel free to reply.