Ray lays it out and I agree with his befuddlement.
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Strava is nuts. Garmin has plenty of useless features for me, but Strava pretending to be anything but social media is delusional. If Garmin was cut off from Strava, I would be leaving Strava, not Garmin.
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I think Strava is miscalculating as I think as users of both, you and I are in the majority who wouldn’t lose too much sleep over the integration going away. I’d just do a post with a screen shot of the workout from Connect on my phone. Cycling friends can still see it and give kudos, so 
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I never have and still dont fully understand the point of Strava. Ive used it for years merely as an odometer for my annual mileage but antics like this and taking on behemoths such as Garmin is kamikaze like tactics.
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I think its important for a company to stay relevant or die
but Strava instead of making products that keep retention try to “Dr Evil” it by doing stoopid shit.
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The point of Strava:
See what your friends have been up to.
Keep track of and compete on segments, whether it’s against others or just against yourself.
That’s it. You can use it to track fitness, plan and share routes, push to other sites, etc., but you can also do those things elsewhere.
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This is juicy! Thank you for sharing. I have been considering canceling my strava for so long now.. but I never do. I just deleted my Facebook page yesterday, baby steps.
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I am in the process of moving from one city to another and have kept my Strava solely because I want to use it to learn new routes and meet new friends in the new city. Once I’ve done that, I don’t really have any use for it other than as a pass through. I realize that means they were probably going to lose me anyway, but they keep doing things to make me regret being a user and it just strikes me as a massive own goal.
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So not content with alienating third-party developers last year, now they’re going against their biggest partner? I just don’t understand what Strava could possibly have to gain here. I feel like Garmin could put Strava in a world of hurt if they invested in Garmin Connect’s social experience and opened it up so third-party apps can upload activities there again (and for a company the size of Garmin, that’d probably be a relatively small investment).
2 Likes
I really enjoy Strava, have found lots of fun routes based on others rides as well as met many new people to ride with from groups on Strava. I also love seeing my global heat map on there where I’ve tracked activities all over the world and how it has my pictures from those activities. All that being said I would be canceling immediately if they broke integration with Garmin where all of those activities come from and I don’t think it would even take a massive lift for Garmin to turn Connect into a platform that competes with Strava if they really wanted to invest in that. Seems like a really dumb move from Strava and kind of unbelievable they couldn’t find a less public solution to whatever they feel like they need resolved.
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Strava is a fairly useless platform suitable for entertainment purposes only. Garmin should call their bluff and cut them off from Connect. They’d change their tune very quickly.
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Is Strava somehow using this lawsuit in a weird technique to get Garmin to buy shares of Strava’s IPO? “We’ll drop this lawsuit if you buy a portion of Strava, it’ll save you the money/hassle of going through this lawsuit”???
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One day Strava will stop making stupid mistakes. Today is not that day.
We need a Strava alternative.
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I really hope Garmin cuts off their API upload to Strava, and when people complain, tell them it’s because of Strava’s behavior. Let’s see how long Strava is relevant if it loses automatic uploading of data from Garmin.
Strava’s biggest business mistake was not introducing a paid “API” / “Data Sync” membership option around a low $s a month to have really grab syncing across every possible platform with Strava as the hub that would handle the dirty work of integrating to every platform, deduplicating, etc. I don’t pay for Strava, but if Strava offered this, and it would really sync everything and keep duplicates from popping up in my feed, platforms not passing all the FIT file info across, etc. I would pay for this.
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Strava biting the hand that feeds it. This is a move of a scorned ex. What did Garmin do to hurt their feelings?
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Monumentally dumb move.
Seems like the last ditch effort of a dying company.
The idea of a Strava IPO next year is bewildering. I’m predicting a spike followed by a massive dump into perpetual penny stock land.
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It’s because Garmin wants activities that come from Garmin displayed as such on Strava, just like is done now with many others like Zwift, Rouvy, TrainerRoad, etc. I guess this is their (dumb) way of “fighting back”?
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Strava wouldn’t be a thing if it were not for the likes of Garmin syncing activities, they’re own app has actually lost features over the years for recording activities and I imagine the vast majority of Strava users record activities on another device rather than the Strava app. I really hope Garmin takes them on, the behave of Strava over the last few years in relation to other apps/sites has been appalling, be good to see someone bring the bully down a notch or two.
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Hard to say what the motivation is, but patent lawsuits are used in all kinds of ways. Not uncommon for a smaller company to launch lawsuits against a big industry player (Garmin being a $6B+ sized company) with the hope that they cut a check to make it go away. In a previous job, my company was the market leader and a constant target of competitors claiming patent infringement. One of our competitors probably made more $ from being a patent troll than they did from selling competitive products. It used to drive me crazy (because it hit our bottom line), but the corporate lawyers would just pay them to make them go away (until the next lawsuit). The lawsuits usually had no basis, but the patents are often written so broadly that it still takes a bunch of resources to fight the claims (particularly when it comes to technology patents that a normal person can’t understand).
3 Likes