Will Fitbit work with Huawei? How to make Fitbit work on Huawei handsets

Are you having trouble getting your Fitbit device working with Huawei phones? You’re not alone. I used to own a Huawei P20 Pro and while it was a very good handset, it wasn’t exactly friendly to my day job of reviewing wearables that frequently wouldn’t connect or would require hours of troubleshooting before working.

Still, I learned a few tricks before eventually upgrading to a Samsung Galaxy S10e. So before you follow the nuclear option of buying a whole new smartphone, here are a few things that are worth trying…

Will Fitbit work with Huawei? Things to try…

First things first, if you own a Huawei P8 Lite or P9 Lite then stop trying right now. Fitbit says the phones aren’t supported in its official help section. The good news is that no other Huawei handsets are mentioned, and as it was last updated this year, that’s a good sign…

So: some things to try.

1. Huawei phones are well known for having long battery lives, but a lot of this comes from aggressive software that shuts down perfectly useful apps it deems not to be in use. So the first thing to try is letting the Fitbit app get a pass.
   
   Go into Settings > Battery > App Launch and find Fitbit in the list. Make sure it’s set to “Manage manually”.

2. While you’re in Settings, also go to Apps > Apps > Fitbit and make sure notifications are allowed, and check everything in Permissions is ticked. 

3. Then do a search in your Settings for “Battery Optimisation”. This is a list of apps that you’re allowing Huawei to put to sleep when not in use. Scroll down to Fitbit and select “Don’t allow”. 

4. Finally – and this is what worked for me – add the Fitbit Step Counter widget somewhere on your home screen. It doesn’t have to be your main one, so can be ‘out of sight, out of mind’. To do this, hold down on your home screen until it shrinks and press “Widgets” at the bottom of the screen. Scroll across to Fitbit and then add the “Fitbit Primary Goal” widget, which will take up a 2×2 block.   

Even though Fitbit became a whole lot more reliable after I followed these steps with my Huawei phone, I can’t pretend it was a flawless experience. Syncing issues were still frequent, for example, but it did at least mean notifications came through loud and clear, and it would stop disconnecting so frequently. Your mileage may vary, of course…