If you own a Pixel Watch, there’s a chance you have seen a stubborn permission prompt carrying the Fitbit logo on your wrist. It asks for access to your sensor data and refuses to leave no matter how many times you dismiss it.
The frustrating part is that most people hit by this have already granted every permission the watch could possibly want. Everything is toggled on, and yet the warning keeps persisting.
Several users on Reddit have also pointed out that the Health app is still recording their sensor data without any trouble, which suggests the error message is crying wolf. Others have not been so lucky, and report that their data has stopped syncing to the phone entirely.
Is your watch model the problem?
There’s no clear pattern here linking the bug to one specific device. The user who first raised the issue mentioned owning the watch for over two years, which places it at a Pixel Watch 3 or an older model, but the complaints are not neatly limited to any single generation.
What we do know is that the error started popping up only in the last few weeks. That timing has led many users to point their fingers at a recent Google Health update, and honestly, that’s the most reasonable explanation available right now.
So how do you fix it?
Here’s where it gets strange. Factory resetting your watch will not help, and neither will any of the usual permission juggling. A user “Suelg” wrote on the Google support forum that he went through the entire shenanigan of resetting his watch, but it didn’t fix the issue.
Instead, what fixed it was enabling notifications for the Health app on the watch itself. That is a weird fix, but it works, and several users have corroborated his fix.
So, if you are also facing the same issue, turn on notifications for the Health app on your Pixel Watch, and the permission error should go away. Nobody can explain why a notification toggle fixes a sensor permission warning. But if it works, it works.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
