Fighting with Fitbit's tech support
I doubt I'll find any new ideas, but maybe someone here has one. I'm running out of places to turn, with no solution.
I have been in a fight with Fitbit support for a few weeks now over their push to migrate everyone to a Google-linked Fitbit account. I'm pretty sure what I've found is a rare edge case of a bug, or rather, an unaccounted for set of conditions when trying to migrate.
A long time ago, 2017 I think, I created a Google-linked Fitbit Account (via oauth, "Login with Google"). I used it briefly and then stopped, and completely forgot about its existence.
In 2022, I got a Pixel Watch and created a new/second Fitbit Account with a different email address, as I did not remember I had a Fitbit account already and I wanted to use a masked email address through my personal domain.
With the push to migrate all Fitbit accounts to Google accounts, I decided to try to do so last month. When I attempted to migrate my second account to a Google account, I got an error that I already had an account registered under my Google account. So I logged in to that old 2017 Google account and initiated its deletion. It told it me would take 30 days to delete it, so I waited 31 days.
31 days later, I tried to migrate my second account to a Google account. When I try to do so, I get an error:
Can't use Fitbit with this Google Account
This could be because you're using a Google Workspace account, or because your account is supervised.
My account is neither a child account, nor a Workspace account, it's a standard (adult) account I've had for something like 16 years.
So I tried to see if my old Google account was perhaps not deleted after all. I tried to log in to my old account via oauth (Sign In > Continue with Google), and I get a different error:
Sign in again to continue
Since you deleted Fitbit from your Google Account, you’ll need to sign in again as a new user.
I suspect that what happens when I deleted my old/original Google account is that it wasn't actually deleted, but made inactive with some "deleted" flag, but the account hasn't been purged. As a result, I'm unable to migrate my new account to the same email address I used for my old Google account.
Reaching out to Fitbit, they continually put the blame on Google for reporting my account as a workspace/supervised account, and the only solution they'll offer me is "You should create a new Google account". Google has also been unable to help, but that doesn't surprise me, as I don't think it's an issue on their end. Requests to Fitbit to escalate my case to a higher tier of support and/or someone from some type of database team have been stonewalled, and I think that Fitbit support has now just stopped responding to me entirely.
Does anyone have any idea where I could turn?
First I want to say, I feel your frustration. The fitbit is a pretty good product overall, but this kind of stuff makes me want to take a hammer to it when it happens to me.
The Consumerist folks (what a good blog that was) used to talk about the Executive Email Carpet Bomb.
I scraped the following from a barely-loading archive page:
In addition to that, I would make sure you @ their official social media with a complaint anywhere you have social media. If you are like me and have almost no presence, but you have a friend with lots of followers, you might ask them to amplify your post.
I am bookmarking this. I can't wait for the day someone fucks up and I'll send an EECB.
This.... this puts a big smile on my face, and made me laugh with contempt.
I've done it (to Fitbit in fact!), and it worked, but that was before Google bought them, when they still had their headquarters down the street from where I worked at the time (wow it feels so long ago). Their support is just awful in general, and I had a defective product two times in a row through no fault of my own. The first was faulty and within warranty, so they replaced it.... with another, more faulty product and refused to rectify the situation further until I put them on blast on Social as well as following these steps. The steps above are what eventually got me a working fitbit. I was happy with the product, but I eventually switched to an apple watch because at least Apple has a place where I can get support in person if necessary. Fitbit's support is awful, slow, and their forums are a nightmare.
In Brazil the most effective way to get a response is posting at ReclameAqui (Complain Here). It's a big website for which will rank if they solve it or not.
Having a bad score there scares almost all of them so they reply and fix it quickly. Even giant companies like MercadoLivre and Adidas will do something about it. Don't know about Google tho.
We used to have something like that here in the US -- the Better business Bureau. I think it still exists but afaik no one cares about it anymore.
My instinct is I think the same as yours — if I was in your situation I wouldn’t really care what went wrong, I’d just want my account in place the way I wanted it.
However, I think you might have better luck breaking the problem down and clearing up the roadblock one piece at a time.
Using the “deleted” Fitbit account, raise a ticket saying that you can see that your account hasn’t really been deleted, as it’s causing a conflict when you try to migrate your other account. Therefore you’d like your account to be really properly actually deleted please, and as you’ve already waited the 31 days, you’d like that actioned effective immediately. Then when they’ve done it, you’d like confirmation that it’s been done.
Once that’s done, try migrating again and if you run into issues, say “hey, I own the other account that’s causing a conflict, but I’ve asked it to be deleted, so it better be really properly actually deleted, and if it’s deleted then I can merge my account without issue, right?”
Note, I’m not any kind of expert here, so I can’t guarantee results, but whenever I run into a complex multi-part problem, I like to break it down in this way.
Best of luck!
Are you using a @ gmail.com account or one with a personal domain?