Take away?
Its their features to take away.
People are not entitled to any feature they were getting. Its a log. With social aspects, The rest is gravy.
People have no right to be angry because they took something that was not them to begin with.
Its like someone getting angry at the kid who brought the basketball to the game when he has to leave and takes the ball with him.
That might be true but I find Garminās website and app to be a nightmare to navigate and find what I am looking for. I would rather try to analyze my data on Strava than Garmin for that reason. It may not be more advanced but at least it is straight forward and easy to use.
That being said Iāll do anything more than a cursory glance over my data in either intervals.icu or TR.
The one thing you have to address with freemium apps is monetizing the free part. There are two ways of doing this: pushing your free users to buy the premium package, or monetizing the free users as-is. The second model is pretty popular - there is an entire mobile app industry that trades features or entertainment you see value or interest in, against your patience in enduring ads firehosed at you. Thereās also the data sellers - small ma-and-pa shops like Google, Facebook and the like - but that road is not as simple, you really need to be generating a dataset that has value to others.
It appears to me Strava took the first model: give you a free service that can be enhanced with a premium, for-a-fee set of extras. I donāt know what the adoption rate of the premium over free is for them, but this is a hard road. Loads of people have tried it, with much crisper value props, and have faced the cost-vs-revenue steep climb, forcing them to move the free-vs-premium slider, antagonizing users, and slipping down the hill - Dropbox, Evernote, anyone?
TLDR: as long as Strava does not make money from the large number of users they have who only care about watching what their friends did, they will suffer badly.
You get pretty much what you are paying forā¦
I am pretty sure I said that.
āEntitledā is the wrong word to use here. Again, there was an agreement entered intoā¦part of that agreement was the feature set, of which the leaderboards were one. As noted, Strava is certainly within their rights to change that agreement, but that doesnāt mean people donāt have reason to be rightfully upset about it.
The agreement in question is actually spelled out in their terms of service, the blurb nobody reads but says yes to when creating an account. I have not read those for Strava, but Iām ready to bet two used chains and a pair of vintage Shimano 105 road pedals that it includes the right for them to change features without prior notice.
We live in a strange universe: companies provide us free access to their network (well, AWSās in this case, but you get the point), storage, an app to manage it all, and we get all worked up when they want something in return.
Agreed 100% that it is, in all likelihood, covered in the user agreement. Iāll emphasize this again - I am not saying they donāt have the right to do this .
Though I have also given them many 100s of dollars for their hardware so itās not like they havenāt gotten anything. So in the context of Strava itās not exactly a 1-1 comparison.
Got it - Garmin.
Yes, you are right. But GC is just a feature of their hardware, so no big incentive to invest tons into it.
Perhaps Iāve been miscommunicating my rant.
strava can definitely charge for 100% of their product, thatās completely fine.
What I take opposition to is being charged for a particular selection of that service which costs them very little to operate and, quite frankly, offers close to zero functional value (e.g. strava keeps my times in one handy location so I donāt have to do it myself), and is riddled with error. For me personally, strava is an organizational app more than anything, but the price still outweighs the benefit.
For strava to start charging for leaderboard access reveals their most used/strongest feature. Time will tell if people think the feature is worth paying for. Perhaps there are more people willing to pay for social access than people concerned with functional value.
Not sure where Amazon comes inā¦But I have given Garmin many 100s of dollars buying their headunits and such. So even though their Garmin Connect service is free to access they have still gotten my money through other means. Strava on the other hand only has their software with no other direct revenue channels from me.
To me it doesnāt really matter that GC is difficult to use because I literally only use it to pass rides automatically from my headunit onto Strava, TR, etc.
Edit: Just say your edit but yeah they already have your money from the hardware and cycling is by far not their biggest market so there probably isnāt a huge incentive to make their website better. For example, my GF has a watch for running and the app shows her everything that she needs to see at the moment. She can see her intervals, her distance, pace, etc. She has no need to see HR decoupling and other more advanced metrics so their apps probably do fine for 90+% of their users.
The weird thing to me about Strava is, IMO they should be going all-in on their route building. I believe theyāre unique in being able to mash up all their heatmap and segment data and actively help users find good routes that are safe and bike-friendly ā¦ If tons of other cyclists like the roads, they should be good for you too.
Why donāt they put that featureset front and center?
They seem to split their value prop all over the place between fitness analytics, KOMs/leaderboards, etc.
To me the biggest slap in the face in all this is that their routes donāt provide turn-by-turn on Wahoo Elemnt and Bolt, even though RideWithGPS and Komoot both can. Why, why, WHY? I know there is (or was) some workaround where you download Stravaās file and manually add turn-by-turn but RWGPS and Komoot both have it nailed out of the box so what in the world is wrong over at Strava HQ.
This is wrong. The features they are taking away are features that people will pay for. People already subscribe so they must be offering something. The problem for strava is that there wasn;t much difference between what you got for free or what you paid for. You can call it not delivering features that people want to pay forā¦OR you can call it giving the best things away for freeā¦Leaderboardsā¦route planning. These are probably the two big features. So now they are saying, youāve had these free for so long, we think they are valuable so now we are asking you to contribute. Seems fair to me. You can see the value in thse items by people complaining they are being taken away. People only complain if they care about something. So yes, people expect something for free even though it costs money to produce. People have had it free for yearsā¦thatās a good ride. If itās valuable to youā¦pay up. If not donāt. But people willā¦in their masses.
And as for Training Peaksā¦Strava arenāt really tryng to compete with these. TSS, CTL etc are owned by Training Peaks so Strava canāt use those without permission. Strava has set itself as a social platform. leaving analytics to those really better qualified.
I canāt speak for the Wahoo turn-by-turn, but the new route builder that they put out a couple days ago has been really good the couple of times Iāve played with it. Much, much easier to use than the old one. It is still missing a couple features that RWGPS and others have but itās a step in the right direction.
Being able to see segments while you plan the route is a no brainer and nice to have if you are trying to go for some.
And the couple of times I have put in point to point routes it has put me on all of the roads that I probably would have selected on my own.
Whether one agrees or disagrees on Stravaās move, or whether Strava is even a functional platform as is, you cannot deny the incredible influence it has on cyclists, runners, swimmers, etcā¦ āThe Audience Effectā is an entire chapter in Matt Fitzgeraldās How Bad Do You Want It? (a seemingly highly recommended book within this forum and the podcast), as well as a well studied area of psychology.
The idea alone of having an audience who is watching your training will improve performance. And to say that Strava has no functionality in this, you would have to argue, in my opinion, that the Group Workouts here on TR also do not have functionality. The performance benefit, benefit of motivation, being able to produce more power and get faster times on different segments comes along with having an audience. For some people it may be about the ego, yes thatās true. But this is not the case for everyone, and I would argue that the majority of people get out on their bike, endure greater distances, and do so at a higher level with Strava than they ever would without it.
While understandable the frustration that this feature was moved from Free to Premium in the matter of moments, one cannot deny the benefit Strava has had and will continue to have to all athletes looking for that extra āpushā.
Again, I realize not everyone needs this, but just because you donāt, doesnāt mean the vast majority of current athletes, beginners, those recovering from injury or lacking motivation, etc. receive incredible functionality through the use of Strava.
@CatCryRides thank you, well said.
Weāll have to agree to disagree.
I think you missed my point entirely. I am talking about options they could have provided to entice people to move up to a paid subscription vs. taking features away from them. The analytics example was just thatā¦an example.
And Training Peaks regularly gives out permission to use their trademarked termsā¦IIRC, they were willing to do it for simple recognition, no charges involved. (admittedly that may have changed, I donāt know). However, it was clear by their own actions that Strava was looking to provide performance analyticsā¦but their strategic direction was poor, at best.
Seeā¦ Thats my problem. The expectation of said agreement. You are implying user and strava entered in some kind of agreement on what strava should give for free. Thats the definition of entitlement. There is no agreement on what strava will give you for free. everyone is at their mercy and they can take and give any feature they want at any time, specially free things. Now, if you were a paying customer and got something and suddenly they remove the feature you signed up for, then your argument was valid. But in this case is not.
As they have done to TR. If you look at your calendar or anywhere else TSS, IF, and other similar metrics have a (R) next to them.
TR probably pay for it.
Strava doesnt want to and they made their own thing that is similar the way Pepsi is similar to Coca-Cola.