For the last 3 weeks or so, I’ve been getting progressively more and more annoyed with my Fitbit Charge HR not syncing and displaying the wrong time. The Fitbit website acknowledged the problem but just said their engineers were working on a solution:

“Some customers have reported difficulty syncing their Charge HR recently. We’ve also heard reports that the time of day is incorrect on the tracker or other data missing is from the dashboard. Our engineers are investigating the problem, and once the root cause is diagnosed we’ll work on repairing the issue as quickly as possible. In the meantime, try our standard troubleshooting steps in I can’t sync my tracker. If those don’t work, try each of the tips below until your tracker works properly. Note that the problem may reoccur, meaning you may need to revisit these tips again in a few hours or days.”

After whinging on Twitter about the lack of updates to the above, I decided to contact Fitbit support and was actually pretty surprised by the response.

Rather than just referring me to the help article I’d already read (although they did that as well!), the response from Fitbit included the following steps (slightly edited to reflect my experience):

1. Turn off other Bluetooth devices near to the tracker, make sure the wireless sync dongle is unplugged from the computer.
2. Turn off Bluetooth on the mobile device that will be used to sync.
3. Force quit the Fitbit app and turn mobile device off.
4. While mobile device is off, restart the tracker.
5. Turn mobile device on, check the Internet connection and enable Bluetooth
6. [Remove the device in the Fitbit app.]
7. Set up as a new device.
8. If, after 3 to 4 minutes it is stuck in “Finishing up” message, close the app, and open again.
9. In some cases it takes longer, make sure the tracker is near to the mobile device all the time.
10. If it is still finishing up, Set up the tracker again, Charge HR will be syncing properly after that.

It took a couple of attempts last night to set up the device again but after a while I managed to get things working and it’s actually been pretty good since. Ironically I now see that the app is suggesting there’s an update for my Charge HR – maybe the one that prevents this issue!