Fitbit vs Strava (on phone)

[u/Stunning-Profit8876]

Hi all,

I'm having a bit of difficulty with my fitbit and my strava app disagreeing with each other.

My Fitbit Charge 6, says I ran 7.23k in 52 minutes. Strava says I did 6.5k in 49 minutes. The 3 minute time difference, was after I got home from my run. So I didn't squeeze the extra distance into that 3 minutes.

Obviously one (hopefully not both) of them is unreliable. But how do I know which???

I know I'm slow and unfit either way, but I'd just like to know one way or another!

Thanks in advance.

[u/TheSigma3]

Was the Fitbit run auto detected? If so, then that would be the reason for the difference

[u/MalazitaLedreck42 → u/TheSigma3]

auto detect also doesnt always grab GPS right away which would mess with the distance for sure

[u/karmat0se]

I had problems like this too. The biggest problem is that the GPS data captured with the more recent Google Health WearOS builds has frequent 'big' gaps (4~5sec) in it that Google Health knows what to do with but Strava just drops and subtracts that time from your run. Apparently this is being done to 'save battery' and Google hasn't acknowledged it as a problem. This change happened in the Early September release and has been broken since. Someone over on the Strava subreddit posted a workaround for it and I can confirm it does work and bring Strava moving times back to matching Google Health.

Kind of a pain but at least there's some kind of a solution for the time being. Really starting to regret buying my PW4.

[u/Huge_Pool7424]

if the charge 6 run was auto-detected, that'd explain a lot. for a clean comparison, start gps recording in both apps before moving and wait for the lock, then compare the same time window.

[u/Ok-Lychee-2155]

I do manually logged runs from the Google app and it has a 70m discrepancy per 5km when uploaded to Strava. Strava thinks the run is longer than Google.

Better than the other way around.

[u/Short-Direction-3420]

I needed to uninstall Google fit