There'll be a somewhat convoluted point to this rant/post pertaining to the devices in the picture below, but the crux of it is this: I can no longer sync my Fitbit.

Occasionally my Fitbit's battery would run completely flat and when I put some juice into it it would come back on with the incorrect time; the longer it was left flat, the more wrong the time would be (quite annoying when the alarm goes off half an hour late and you spend your morning half-an-hour behind schedule without realising it - yep that happened - now I know to check the time if the battery has been flat). This would rectify itself by syncing it, which often I'd forget about doing for ages to the point where some data would seemingly get lost, like if I scrolled back through the days/weeks/months in the app, there'd be a gap. I always assumed I'd maybe filled the memory and it had no way of warning me of this.

Anyway, on the previous occasion this occurred the time ended up completely out of whack and it wouldn't sync (I assumed the two issues were related). I ended up resetting the Fitbit and I re-added it to the app, and then it seemed to sync... but I might be wrong about this; I may have simply assumed it was fine... because the next time I tried to casually sync it, it just stayed doing that without finishing. That's how things are now. It won't sync. This is a little more annoying besides because I'd recently spent £3 on a new strap for it (it looks snazzy in yellow, huh?)... the 3rd set I'd had to buy in my few years of ownership.

Anyway, the Fitbit app has always prompted me to update it (like for over a year), but I have always ignored this because it works and I generally don't update things unless I need to. But could this be related? Has it now just stopped syncing because of this, with no other warning?

To test the water I fired up one of the phones I'd been given this year to see if I could actually download the Fitbit app because these phones are "old" now and only running on Android 6.0, like the tablet I've been using with the Fitbit (that might even be 5.0).

As I had guessed the Fitbit app is no longer available to Android 6.0 and in doing some digging 10.0 is the minimum requirement. I essentially have three smartphones and a tablet that all work fine otherwise* but are considered obsolete. This way-of-things stinks. The same could technically be said of most of the computers I own (and there's a lot) which are being made obsolete by Microsoft once Windows 10 expires next year, if it wasn't for the fact I have an early copy of Windows 11 which I've made to work on 95% of Windows 10-compatible computers... not that I can recommend Windows these days, because I can't.

Of course a new smartphone can be had for a day's wage, so after earning such I could just go out and buy one. But all this stuff that's just made obsolete... jeez.

[Of course I'm still assuming it's the outdated Fitbit app that's preventing my Fitbit from syncing.]

There is one other app I would seemingly benefit from having and that is Lidl+ (or is it Plus?), as this wont work on Android 6 either, although I can't find out what the minimum requirement is from the Google Play store (and you have to view the app page via a web browser for that kind of info). [Lidl started having offers around the store for their app-users and the labels on the shelf caught me out first because I thought they were just promoting a new lower price...).

Incidentally, one of those phones (the one with the cracked screen protector) I borked the OS on it by trying to hack another one onto it a number of moons ago (although I only now use it for its camera app and VLC/as an MP3 player), and another, after a factory reset, can't access Google Play, so that's rendered pretty much useless anyway.

I still quite like wearing the Fitbit (although the time is now wrong again) and using it to log my daily calories and miles walked when I go out for a hike, but I have to manually make a note of these, like I do with my bike computer... which also stopped working this year...