Yesterday Strava sent out an e-mail to users, outlining a change that’s occurring almost immediately, regarding 3rd party apps and the way apps are allowed to access and process data from Strava. All of these changes impact what is known as the Strava API (Application Programming Interface). That’s the piece that lets your Garmin watch push your workout to Strava, and then lets an app like VeloViewer or others access your data.
There are countless apps that use Strava’s API, literally tens of thousands according to Strava. Some of these are tiny, some of them are massive. Virtually every company in the space uses Strava’s API, including Garmin, Wahoo, TrainerRoad, VeloViewer, Xert, and plenty more. It’s become the defacto data hub for millions of athletes, some 100m+ according to Strava’s press release.
In any event, the e-mail Strava sent out, as you can see below, is pretty bland, and doesn’t really get into things:
Instead, you need to crack open the included link to start understanding the implications. All of which roughly boils down to two main items (but a bunch of smaller things), there’s three biggies:
#1: “Third-party apps are no longer able to display your Strava activity data on their surfaces to other users.”
#2: “We’re updating our terms to explicitly prohibit third parties from using any data obtained via Strava’s API in artificial intelligence models or other similar applications.”
#3: “You may not process or disclose Strava Data…for the purposes of, including but not limited to, analytics, analyses…”
They also included language that apps are somehow not allowed to replicate Strava’s “distinctive look and feel”, which…ok. And more hilariously, they added that any users posting to their community hub forums that are “requesting or attempting to have Strava revert business decisions will not be permitted” and summarily deleted.
Said differently: Do not discuss the community things you don’t like in the community.
But again, the big three that matter here are:
#1: Apps can’t show your data beyond yourself
#2: Apps can’t use any “AI” whatsoever in their processing of your data
#3: Apps can’t do any analytics or data processing of your data
To understand how ridiculous these are, let’s outline some real-world apps you’re probably familiar with.
Breaking Coaching and Comparison Apps:
The first item (not showing data beyond yourself) immediately breaks almost all coaching apps that have connections to Strava. This includes apps like Final Surge, Xert, and Intervals.icu. These are apps that pull in your Strava data (as you requested) to analyze on your platform. For visual reference, this:
Now you may be wondering why they don’t just go directly to Garmin, Wahoo, etc… That’d be more effective, right? And indeed it is, and most of these apps do. Except there are literally thousands of device manufacturers out there, and many of them only connect to Strava.
Take for example the AmazFit T-Rex watch I’m testing right now. That doesn’t connect to Final Surge. Or Xert. Or TrainerRoad. Or much else. It does connect to Strava though, so, my data uploads to Strava and I’m done – off it goes to all my authorized apps. The same is true for the Google Pixel Watch. Or Samsung’s Galaxy watches. Below is a good example of how I can get all those data types into Strava.
Strava benefits because they’ve become the defacto platform of choice for consumers. Companies benefit because they don’t need never-ending connections to platforms. And consumers benefit because everything ‘just works’. That’s the goal, right? Just working?
Well, not anymore.
With this change, apps that do any sort of coaching on their platform are not allowed to show the end users data to their coach. The new API terms and conditions explicitly prohibit this:
“you may not disclose such data to, or use it for, another user nor any other third party.”
In fact, the popular training and coaching platform Intervals.icu already posted this breaks all coaching features for them related to Strava data – requiring them to hide not only new user data going forward, but all historical data for coaches.
“Activities from Strava will soon only be visible to the athlete that performed the activity, not to their coaches or followers. This is a new addition to the Strava API terms and conditions.”
But it also breaks plenty of other apps that aren’t coaching apps – but merely showing Strava data. For example, apps like VeloViewer, which curates your lists of segments for deeper analytics and competition among groups, breaks. Same goes for all of their leaderboards for Zwift. Or their challenges. Or the listing of other people’s efforts (when you click on ‘View on Veloviewer’ from any of these below. All of it – going to be killed off if apps follow the letter of the law.
Like these details:
The challenge with these changes, is that practically speaking, unless you have a Garmin or other big-name device with a proper and well-documented public and easy to access API, all of these apps won’t set up connections to those device platforms directly. They can’t in some cases, and it won’t be feasible in most to service all of these app requests. Even seemingly big players like Wahoo, Hammerhead/SRAM, and Polar don’t have easily accessible APIs that scale well to the number of requests that are going to be required here.
No Analysis of Data Apps:
But wait, there’s more. Strava’s new API agreement also makes clear that you can’t do ‘year in review’ type summaries either. In fact, it actually says you can’t do any analytics or processing of the data:
“You may not process or disclose Strava Data, even publically viewable Strava Data, including in an aggregated or de-identified manner, for the purposes of, including but not limited to, analytics, analyses, customer insights generation, and products or services improvements. Strava Data may not be combined with other customer data, for these or any other purposes.
In fact, as one major app pointed out to me, the above paragraph basically says you can’t do anything with any data at all. While portions of the above entry existed in previous API versions, this paragraph has now been expanded to be more precise.
With the above line, you can’t do much of anything. You want to show a user how many miles they ran that week? Nope, not according to the letter of the law as that’s ‘processing’ for the purposes of ‘analytics’. You want to show them how hard their workout was compared to a year ago? Nope, can’t do that either, that’s ‘processing’ for the purposes of ‘analysis’. Want to create a heat map tile like VeloViewer has? Nope, that’s “aggregated” data for “insights generation”:
While Strava lawyers might try and say perhaps that line is there to prevent something else, any non-lawyer or lawyer would argue the opposite in court if they had to. That single paragraph basically says apps can’t do anything at all. Period.
The problem here is that Strava’s API terms are so broad and wonky now, that the API no longer serves a purpose, as stated by the above paragraph.
Nonetheless, I went back to Strava and asked them questions about many of these topics, trying to get clarification to see if this was a misunderstanding, they completely ignored the questions I had, and responded with:
“These changes were implemented to provide additional safeguards around our community’s data and to help ensure that a user’s Strava data can only be viewed by others on third-party apps in limited scenarios where sharing is both transparent and central to the functionality of the app. We recognize this is a change and are committed to working closely with partners during this transition.”
Point being, I gave them an opportunity to clarify things or set the record straight, and they said ‘nah’.
Add to that, they don’t seem all that committed to “working closely with partners”. As every single partner I’ve talked to over the last 24 hours has been completely broadsided by this change. They all received a generic e-mail Friday night, with a mere 30 days of notice to completely re-work their entire applications. Mind you, a 30-day period that includes the holidays (most companies would give at least 6 months of notice for something like this).
I suspect we’ll see a lot of companies just shut off the API entirely, and perhaps that’s Strava’s goal. Though, I fail to see how that benefits paying Strava subscribers, and thus Strava’s bottom line. Strava seems to be working very hard to kill off the community of tens of thousands of apps that arguably made it so popular.
No AI Usage & Analytics:
The next issue is just as crazy as the the others. It says that 3rd party apps may not use artificial intelligence processing in any way, for your data coming from Strava. Specifically, it stays the following:
“You may not use the Strava API Materials (including Strava Data), directly or indirectly, for any model training related to artificial intelligence, machine learning or similar applications.”
Of course, the term “machine learning or similar applications” basically means “you may not do any processing at all” on it, especially when combined with the above ‘no analytics’ clauses.
This particular line item immediately kills apps like TrainerRoad and Xert using data from Strava, but also countless other apps that pull in your own workout data via Strava, and then use some sort of processing to analyze it. Machine learning is hardly new or fancy. And putting in there “similar applications”, what on earth does that mean?
TrainerRoad and others use “AI” (however they want to define it), according to their marketing, and thus, in less than 30 days, they’ll have to cease their entire platform, or, disconnect Strava.
In the case of platforms like TrainerRoad, I suspect they’ll simply disable Strava altogether, and force everyone through direct connections. This will be fine for Garmin users, but as of right now there’s no inbound connection for Wahoo users (though that’s coming). And for people pushing Zwift workouts to TrainerRoad, that too will break until TrainerRoad completes their API connection in January.
But that won’t solve the larger issue TrainerRoad and other companies face, which is having to pull in the other 3rd party workout data types. TrainerRoad doesn’t have a connection to Suunto. Or Polar. Or AmazFit. Or Google. Or Fitbit. Or…I could do this all day. Strava solved that, to the benefit of both consumers and all companies involved.
Now Strava seems to want to own the “AI space” with its always-helpful AI insights that simply re-word my activity titles and tell me something vaguely positive but usually wrong.
Update from Strava (Nov 19th):
After publishing this post and video, Strava has issued an update in response. Note, they didn’t reach out or respond to me with the text, but did respond to The Verge where the updated text was originally issued, before publishing it on Strava’s own newsroom site. The Verge e-mailed me the update with permission to use, prior to Strava’s posting. Here’s the full text of the update:
Updated on Nov. 19
We wanted to provide some additional context around the changes to our API Agreement and the impact for our users and developers. We currently anticipate these changes will impact less than .1% of applications and proactively notified the majority of those affected last week.
Enhanced Privacy and User Control
Privacy and user control are at the forefront of our platform. As a result, we are committed to evolving our API practices as regulatory requirements and user expectations shift. This includes the decision to limit the ability of a user’s data to be displayed by third-party apps in ways the user may not expect. Specifically, we want to thoughtfully address situations where users connect to a third-party app and are unaware that their data is being surfaced not just for their own use and visibility, but also to other users (for example, in a public feed or heatmap). The latest API changes address this scenario and provide a more consistent framework for Strava user data.
Training AI Models
We believe in the potential of AI to transform the athlete experience–whether it’s delivering more personalized insights to help you reach your goals, generating route or training recommendations, or countless other possibilities. But innovation in this space must be handled responsibly and with a firm focus on user control. As part of our generative AI features, we are committed to implementing thoughtful solutions that prioritize user control and the ability to opt out.
Third-party developers may not take such a deliberate approach to training AI models and as a result, we believe the best decision for the platform and for users is to prohibit the use of data extracted from Strava users in this manner. Our previous terms already disallowed the use of Strava user data in model training and development but we’ve made this more explicit in light of the increasing activity in this space.
No Impact to Most Developers
We recognize that our platform thrives because of the creativity and dedication of third-party developers who build tools to complement and extend Strava’s capabilities. We are steadfast in our commitment to fostering this ecosystem. We anticipate that these changes will affect only a small fraction (less than .1%) of the applications on the Strava platform–the overwhelming majority of existing use cases are still allowed, including coaching platforms focused on providing feedback to users and tools that help users understand their data and performance.
Collectively, these changes reflect our commitment to ensuring that Strava remains a trusted platform for athletes and developers alike. That means holding ourselves—and anyone building on our platform—to high standards.
However, ultimately, it doesn’t actually change things – in fact, kinda doubles down on it. In it, Strava basically says three things:
A) 3rd party apps can’t show data beyond the user itself. Just as before, this still breaks coaching apps. Strava tries to confuse people by saying “the overwhelming majority of existing use cases are still allowed, including coaching platforms focused on providing feedback to users and tools that help users understand their data and performance.” – however, what they’re actually saying is 3rd party coaching apps can provide feedback, as long as that’s computational feedback. Coaching apps still cannot let human coaches see the data. Had that been the case, Strava would have simply said that, and notified coaching apps. They’ve done neither, and multiple coaching apps I’ve talked to have confirmed Strava hasn’t changed their position, but has scheduled meetings to talk about the impacts.
B) Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is still prohibited. Again, Strava tries to keep distracting people by saying “training models” is not permitted. Yet the terms are very clear, both training and usage isn’t permitted. Still, as any company can tell you, even if it were just training (which again, it isn’t), these models can’t get better without training on the same data for whatever application purpose they are using. After all, last I checked, Strava themselves doesn’t give us permission to allow/deny their access to our data for AI training purposes.
C) “No impact to most developers” – In the update, they say “We anticipate that these changes will affect only a small fraction (less than .1%) of the applications on the Strava platform”. Except, that’s the most disingenuous way of writing it. Strava has tens of thousands of connected applications, the vast majority of which are tiny hobbyist applications that may have 1 user or a handful of users. Instead, it’s the big-ticket applications that matter here with the most users. Strava isn’t saying 0.1% of users, just 0.1% of applications.
–
Ultimately, it seems like Strava’s API itself needs an update if Strava believes users need more control. And to be clear – I’m 100% behind giving users more control. Strava could easily add check-boxes for “AI data usage” and “Show data publically” to the 3rd party platform API authentication dialog (just like they do today for other features). They could easily require 3rd party developers to ensure consent (just like they do today for other features). And they could easily require developers to adhere to various rules (just like they do today).
Going Forward:
Based on these API terms changes, I don’t see how any apps can leverage Strava data going forward. Especially with the specific line item of “You may not process or disclose Strava Data, even publicly viewable Strava Data, including in an aggregated or de-identified manner, for the purposes of, including but not limited to, analytics, analyses, customer insights generation, and products or services improvements.” – that’s fundamentally what any app does: It processes your Strava data and provides some sort of analytics.
Perhaps Strava will try and argue otherwise. In fact, I e-mailed them last night asking them to clarify these very questions, since these seemed pretty broad and impactful. The response was nothing more than sending me to the already-existing page about the API updates.
I feel at times that Strava wakes up each morning, heads to work, looks out over the San Francisco Bay from their offices, and asks itself: How can we anger our users and partners today? How can we make everyone’s life more difficult today?
Every time Strava does something good (such as last week’s night heat maps), they immediately go and ruin that good love with something to upset their user base. And obviously, that’s their prerogative as a company. But it just seems that no company in the sports tech space spends as much time and energy proactively trying to anger their users as Strava does.
“If you envision the whole active community, along with the connected fitness industry as sorta like one giant cycling peloton…then Strava should be leading the way. We should be your lead-out rider, blocking the wind, creating a slip-stream, helping the whole peloton move faster, and more efficiently.”
I’m unclear on how these changes fit with that recently announced vision.
Ultimately, I use and significantly enjoy the core of Strava as much as most other people. I’m on the platform daily. But man…c’mon Strava, just do better.
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It was time to leave Strava several years ago when they started locking your data behind a paywall. I exported my data at that time, deleted my account, and haven’t looked back. This latest move by them just shows that my choice was the correct one.
> Strava has a very dominant and, really, a unique position.
> > There are numerous other options for activity tracking. They are big, but not unique.
Strava’s *position* is unique. I can’t speak for anyone else, but every runner I know uses Strava. Most run with a Garmin, but many almost never use Garmin Connect (not even for looking at their own activities).
I don’t know anyone irl who uses Garmin Connect’s social features.
Outside of strava, I also think it’s fairly uncommon to use secondary (*) platforms for data analysis or activity tracking, like veloviewer, smashrun, metathon, or runalyze. I’m fairly sure I’m the only runner I know (irl) who’s even heard of those apps/sites. Then again, that type of person won’t be affected by these changes at all.
(*) By “secondary” platforms, I mean platforms other than the app associated with the recording device (e.g. Garmin Connect, Apple’s Workout and Health apps).
I have a good number of friends that regularly use Garmin’s social features. We have frequent challenges, we upload pictures to our activities, and have comments about local segment leaderboards. I actually prefer Garmin’s features to those of Strava. Garmin’s maps and route creator feel much more polished when compared to that of Strava.
> Garmin’s maps and route creator feel much more polished when compared to that of Strava.
I have to vehemently disagree here. I think the Garmin route creator is terrible compared to Strava’s. For me, Strava’s route creator beats Garmin’s by a mile on usability, aesthetics and features. I actually wouldn’t refer to anything that Garmin makes as “polished”, no offense. To me, a Garmin running watch is a great tool for running (although there are always issues), and the Connect app/website are ok when I want to look at certain data (only because the exact data I want is unavailable elsewhere, not because Connect is a great experience). “Polished” is the last word that would ever come to mind when I think of that stuff.
Even the limited route editor on the Connect mobile app doesn’t seem to work properly when it comes to do the one of the few things it can apparently do, which is delete waypoints. For example, if I try to delete the last waypoint of a 24 km run, the Connect app will recalculate the course so it ends up being 38 km. If I try it again, but first change the routing method to freehand, the course recalculation process seems to go on forever (I gave up after waiting a couple of minutes).
Meanwhile, the course editor on the Connect website doesn’t really have a way to edit waypoints as a list (as in the Strava website, and allegedly, the Connect mobile app) — they can only be edited on the map itself, which is a bit more limiting. I don’t see a way to add a waypoint from an address, which is something that Strava supports.
I could be wrong, but in the Connect route creator there isn’t an obvious to traverse a loop more than once, since clicking on the course track always adds a new waypoint. When you click on the course track in strava’s route creator you have the option of either adding a waypoint, or extending the course to the that point. Not that it’s a great experience to navigate a course with a loop that’s repeated more than once, but is also just one part of the overall course, but that’s another story.
As far as the social stuff goes, everything that Garmin tries to do, Strava has already done better imo. (For example, segments.) To be fair, I think Garmin knows it will never catch up to Strava, so they probably don’t put a lot of work into it.
If you stick with Garmin’s social stuff and never use Strava, you also miss out on connecting with people who use Apple Watch. Let’s face it, most people under a certain age who are just casual runners or cyclists are def not going to use a Garmin, especially if they started within the last 5-10 years. I know a few casuals who switched from Garmin to Apple, and plenty of ppl who never used Garmin at all. A lot of ppl who don’t use Garmin don’t even understand why runners wouldn’t just Apple Watch.
That’s what most ppl use it for. Lots of ppl run exclusively for likes, too.
But I know a few ppl who can run a 2:30 marathon or win a local 5 miler. They’re not elites, but they’re not hobby joggers either.
They exclusively use Strava. Although they wear Garmins, they prefer to look at their data in Strava as Connect is too “complex”. They don’t use any other apps or websites, like TrainingPeaks or runalyze.
To me, it says a lot that there are Garmin users who apparently almost never open the Connect app or website, and look at everything in Strava. I’m pretty sure I know of lot of runners who do just that.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but my training gains always came from improving my diet, managing my overuse injuries, running hard workouts in a competitive group, and following a proper training plan.
Although there are apps and sites that can help you with some of those things, I don’t think it’s impossible to train properly without using TrainingPeaks (for example).
Interesting… But yes, I feel that GC’s website and route maker are much more polished and user friendly when compared to Strava’s. Garmin’s maps are much better than the ones that Strava uses. Garmin’s course creator tools are much easier to use and have more options when compared to the tools that Strava has. I tried to use Strava’s webpage to automatically create courses of certain distances. The routes that Strava created were also a disaster. If you are able to get it to work for you, then great. It didn’t give me good results.
Another thing about your comment- I am missing out on connecting with people with an Apple watch. I’m totally fine with that because EVERY person I followed with an Apple Watch had bogus activities. Some examples of their bogus activities were “pickleball” while driving down the road, two activities at the same time, and even “swimming” while on a plane. I don’t know what’s up with those watches, but my Strava feed was full of trash from AW users. I don’t miss that in any way.
Good to hear to Garmin’s route creator works better for you. I don’t auto-generate routes; I always create them manually. So I’m not in a position to evaluate Garmin vs Strava with respect to auto generated routes.
From my POV, polished means aesthetically pleasing and relatively free from bugs, with great attention to detail. That’s not the experience I’ve ever had with anything from Garmin, although I realize others may have different experiences.
On the contrary, I use Garmin stuff in *spite* of the bugs and lack of polish. I don’t think Apple is perfect, but at least it can be said that they’ll refuse to add features until they can get the user experience right. Contrast with Garmin, which often adds features in spite of a poor user experience (imo).
Case in point:
– Apple Watch doesn’t play music from its speaker, supposedly because Apple doesn’t think it would be a good user experience (the speaker isn’t powerful enough).
– Garmin’s Fenix 8 forums are full of complaints that the speaker is useless for voice calls and the voice assistant, bc it’s too weak
(Yes I know it’s not a direct comparison, especially since Apple Watch does allow voice calls through the speaker.)
Even DCR has a video where he demonstrates recording a voice note on his Fenix 8; when he plays it back, the volume is apparently so low that he has to put his ear directly next to watch to hear the audio.
And from personal experience, the new audio notes feature for workouts sounded great, until I tried it in practice: the volume was so low when played back through earbuds that the feature was useless. (My earbud volume was set at a level where music and Garmin audio alerts were clearly audible.)
“From my POV, polished means aesthetically pleasing and relatively free from bugs, with great attention to detail.”
Yep, I would agree with that. That’s exactly why I said what I said. Garmin just works. Strava AND Apple have both caused me nothing but problems.
I also manually create routes with Garmin. They are much easier to create with Garmin’s website. Strava’s website is just… clunky (the opposite of polished). My routes often disappeared in the middle of creation with Strava’s system. Multiple times while trying to create a route manually, Strava would add a point at some random location that I was trying to avoid (one again, NOT polished).
Maybe for your specific case of creating routes, but I can’t agree with that in general. I could point to a million bugs and issues with poor design over the year, as well as new bugs which are constantly popping up.
Imo people who don’t think Garmin has an issue with software either use very little of the functionality (most people), or are used to stuff that doesn’t work well (also most people imo). When something doesn’t work well, Garmin users tend either not bother to use that function or they find a workaround.
Garmin has had a very long rep of being good at hardware, but not so good at software. And again, I know many runners who use a Garmin, but almost never open Connect. Says a lot that people refuse to use the software which “comes” with the device in favour of 3rd party apps, especially since Connect is supposed to do everything for Garmin devices (unlike say, Apple’s Workouts app, which afaict, isn’t supposed to be everything for every user, as 3rd party apps are supposed to fill the gaps).
> My routes often disappeared in the middle of creation with Strava’s system. Multiple times while trying to create a route manually, Strava would add a point at some random location that I was trying to avoid (one again, NOT polished).
If that’s your experience, I can’t argue with that.
Again, I’ll say that when I do something as simple as deleting the final waypoint in a route in the Connect app, the route is either recalculated in a nonsensical way (so the length almost doubles) or the recalculation just spins forever. When I delete the final waypoint in Strava, the route just gets shorter, which is exactly what I expect.
If route editing doesn’t work in the Connect app, they should just remove the feature instead of leaving it in a broken state.
It’s also baffling that the route creator in the Connect app would show a list of waypoints (although editing them does not work properly), but the route creator Connect website does not.
And again, I pointed to functionality that the Strava route creator has which the Connect website does not:
– waypoints as a list, so they can be easily viewed, and reordered. Can’t reorder waypoints in Connect
– ability to specify an address for a waypoint
– ability to easily retrace your steps or traverse a loop multiple times, for a limited section of the course. This isn’t really convenient in Connect, because again, clicking on the existing track only ever adds a waypoint, it never extends the course to that point. Ofc there are workarounds for this, which again proves my point that Garmin users are complacent when it comes to stuff like this: “X is broken, no problem, there’s a workaround!” Or “X is broken, but no worries, I don’t need X!”
Honestly I would even rather use a free 3rd party site like onthegomap.com over the Connect route creator.
“It says that 3rd party apps may not use artificial intelligence processing in any way,”
Does it? I read it as Strava not allowing 3rd parties to use Strava data to -train- AI models, but an AI model trained by data that isn’t provided by the Strava API can still be used.
Per the e-mail, it’s clear they mean both training and non-training, saying:
“Our previous terms already prohibited the use of Strava data in large language models and other AI applications but we have made those restrictions more explicit in light of the growing activity in this space.”
(Note: Their previous terms actually didn’t prohibit that either, as it never included the terms AI, artificial intelligence, or large language models.)
It would be fun if Garmin added the same AI/data processing clauses for “Garmin’s” data that is pushed to Strava. How many premium subscribers will be forced to cancel?
I am build an alternative, that will easily allow apps to just change the urls and everything will work as usual, data will go from through device to third party apps, as if it had gone through strava.
I disagree that that is what they are saying — I was thinking what Onno said: Strava seems to say that data can’t be used to *train* models.
I’m sure the default for most AI/LLM processing in this area is to ingest the data, but AI can be used for analyzing data without ingesting that data for training and ongoing learning, but that seems to be Strava’s point.
I don’t read the follow up email as you do; they are saying (in my read) that because they can’t rely on third party devs to use the data responsibly (from their perspective), their default is to “prohibit the use of data extracted from Strava users [for training AI models]. If you think their messages are not written well, I’m 100% with you.
“We believe in the potential of AI to transform the athlete experience–whether it’s delivering more personalized insights to help you reach your goals, generating route or training recommendations, or countless other possibilities. But innovation in this space must be handled responsibly and with a firm focus on user control. As part of our generative AI features, we are committed to implementing thoughtful solutions that prioritize user control and the ability to opt out.
“Third-party developers may not take such a deliberate approach to training AI models and as a result, we believe the best decision for the platform and for users is to prohibit the use of data extracted from Strava users in this manner. Our previous terms already disallowed the use of Strava user data in model training and development but we’ve made this more explicit in light of the increasing activity in this space.”
Maybe this is in answer to a recent flurry of articles about the so-called “Strava leaks” (already reported on a few years ago) where stupid military personnel, head of state bodyguards etc were posting public, geo-localised activities on Strava, revealing confidential locations.
Probably they’re just trying to prevent AI companies to scrape their data for free and have a “plan” to monetize the data themselves.
But for sure, between the debacle of their recent routing “upgrade” and this, they really aren’t making a lot of friends.
Preventing AI companies from scrapping their data for free – This is actually what Strava are doing with Garmin (and others) data to sell their premium subscription. The hypocrisy by Strava is unreal hey.
If you can’t even process and use machine learning on your own data coming back from Strava, I’m not sure if that would even be legal in the EU?
For a company with a business model that’s 100% dependent on Garmin and Apple sending them data from their customers devices, Strava is pretty hostile towards everyone needing data from them. At some point that might backfire in pretty spectacular fashion.
Exactly this. Aside from their own phone app Strava’s existence relies on data they sponge from device mfrs, partners, etc. Imagine if that were suddenly turned off…
I guess there’ll be no more partner/sponsor programs for LeCol and the rest…
“Do not discuss the community things you don’t like in the community.”
And this ^^^ is batcrap crazy 🤦♂️ Combined with the rest it’s remarkably isolationist and authoritarian…, seems to be trending lately…
BTW I never got this email from them (paid subscriber).
Garmin would never do this – that would annoy so many of their customers that rely on Strava and they would definitely lose sales to other device manufacturers that still supported Strava.
If Garmin were to reverse course and suddenly allow other apps to push their data to Garmin, this could be their chance to have Connect make a move on Strava.
the competitive advantage of strava is having so many apps built on top. with these changes they are killing most of them. that’s crazy. For all the affected companies,
for all the apps that need to transition, we are happy to help with Terra API
People use Strava due to the mass user effect. If you lose users, Strava loses relevance. Be it from a social platform standpoint (who’s who), from a routing standpoint (heatmap/etc data becomes less useful), or from a Segments standpoint (nobody is there that matters).
Strava fundamentally needs both free and paid users, no matter how much they try and tell themselves otherwise.
I’m seeing still seeing segments, PRs, data, etc. on people I follow, using Garmin, Zwift, et al. – does this mean this hasn’t gone into effect yet or … have the third-parties complied in some manner?
100%, it is a social database. Now trying to accelerate and secure its AI features. These features are provided by others as well, but not the social aspect. Poor execution of strategy, if there is one.
Strava still happily lets these apps put data INTO the Strava platform (and then considers this Strava property).
The problem with the announced changes is taking the data OUT of Strava and doing anything useful with it.
Wow, what a cluster. I’m on Wear OS, using the SportWerks app, and have all my workouts shipped to Training Peaks, where I’ve had things for over 15 years. Just for fun, since SportWerks allows me to, I’ve also had those workouts shipped to Strava as well for the last two years. I’ve often wondered how a company with the money, size, and might of Strava can put out an app (the Wear OS Strava app) that is so incredibly lame that it’s not even worth the “free” that it costs. After reading this, I now realize why, and that there’s a lot about this company that I don’t want to be around.
Absolutely no issue at all. Best of all, the workout is shipped as soon as you tap the “keep” button on your watch at the end of the workout. I usually get the ding on my watch before my HR has come down 20 bpm! I can see everything that is of value to me on a second-by-second basis (HR, GPS location, stride rate) and my “laps” in SW I have set at 1/4 miles so I also see my split times. Again, not to beat a dead horse, but how can a solo dev, working in his spare time, put out an app so powerful and flexible, and Strava puts out a POS that my old TomTom watch (circa 2015) was better than?
No worries. I’ve done a boatload of testing for this dev (entirely unreimbursed) simply because I want the best available app for our Wear OS devices and the pickings are so slim! Let me know if you have further questions.
Strava seems like they’re hellbent on being the Dallas Cowboys of social networks. Flashy, lots of fun things to look at, but getting worse and worse at the core product offering.
apart from collecting my data I do very little on there … I borrow other people’s routes / rides.
All my analytics is done either by my coach or by me using veloviewer.com
I view the annual subscription of 75€ as a payment to use Veloviewer (plus 10£ for Ben), not to use STRAVA.
If I can’t get what I get currently from Veloviewer because of their change it will be bye from me …
It’s unfortunate that they didn’t respond to you. I wonder if we’re over-reading the terms of ‘can’t do any analysis’ as an individual. The terms indicate that you can’t show any data to anyone other than the user…I feel like the *intent* of the analysis statement was to not do any additional analytics, etc. and show to others, etc. Basically it feels like VeloViewer is still in the realm of acceptable (sans end of year stuff). As I’m only looking at my data.
That said, the API provides convenience, but just as easy for someone like VeloViewer, others to basically say “manually export your data like this…then use our upload feature” and boom, they are NOT using any API agreement :-)
The API agreement is also not that clear. See those 2 bullet points out of the agreement:
– Strava Data provided by a specific user can only be displayed or disclosed in your Developer Application to that user. Strava Data related to other users, even if such data is publicly viewable on the Strava Platform, may not be displayed or disclosed.
– You must always respect Strava users and comply with their privacy choices. This includes not sharing a Strava user’s data with other users, end users of your application, or third parties without explicit consent
I love Strava, as do so many of my friends, training partners and club members. It’s a great place to connect and chat, and spy on how much faster than me they are! I understand they have to make Premium worth it and that means stopping third parties copy features but they are now stifling innovation. Killing Veloviewer will not go down well with a whole bunch of people including the pro cycling teams!
It strikes me as childish behaviour and and a blatant attempt to trap users into their system with no other opportunity to analyse metrics. I wouldn’t mind so much if they offered better analytical tools but they don’t. Veloviewer is great for getting nerdy and it genuinely helps me understand my performance when I’m being super critical about training efforts and races. Strava’s metrics don’t allow that.
I have Garmin devices so I guess Veloviewer could adapt to use that data instead but this just makes everything harder or even impossible for others.
We are a community of athletes who want to be fit and healthy – Strava doesn’t own that and this will backfire badly. U-turn within a week I reckon.
They also bought and then killed Fatmap. Away from cycling it was an incredibly useful route planning tool for many activities. It was extensively used for winter mountaineering as one of the overlays calculated avalanche risk based on depth of snow, angle of slope and wind direction. All Strava have done is kill the original app and incorporate its 3D mapping in its incredibly dull flybys that are not a patch on the Relive ones.
Agree, the end of Fatmap was a huge blow. In fact, Fatmap was what got me into Strava Premium subscription in the first place.
Killing Fatmap put me on the verge of canceling my Premium subscription at the end of this year. And these new API terms, even if not (immediately) implemented to the full extent, has pushed me over the Edge.
Let me translate that for you…
“We don’t want you criticise our product on the community hub – or bosses or investors might see and get upset if they think we’re screwing up the business”
Strava was literally made off the back of data sharing APIs from Garmin, Polar etc. If these didn’t exist, Strava wouldn’t be where it is now. Also Strava has thrived from 3rd party devs enriching the experience. Now they think they’re big enough, they’ll kill it off.
Pretty much that. I actually started on Strava because I had an early WearOS watch and Strava was one of the few on-watch GPS activity tracking apps at the time (Endomondo was the other one). But clearly the vast majority of activities on Strava come from other devices/platforms.
So their logic appears to be: You can import your data into our platform but you cannot have another app/platform take it out via the API for any meaningful use.
That might be ok for free accounts but is not acceptable to me as a Premium subscriber.
They should embrace the position they are in. Instead only make themselves the data hub for subscribers. So if you are a Strava subscriber the apps linking to it, with your permission, will get the data. Then they can make more money, instead of less as now I’m considering terminating my subscription.
Strava has become THE data hub. It’s understandable that they do not want that cost w/o a reward. I think “data hub” services should be free to subscribers or available at a nominal cost as a standalone product.
Likely other apps that might be able to act as hubs so Strava isn’t the only one and we can pick and choose. For example, huopt.com has an interesting high level overview of all of my activities.
to be honest I don’t use strava a lot.
I had the subscription as a way to support them because they were doing a good job and to make some routs a couple of times a year.
I cancelled it so it will not renew in July. I hope they change their mind and apologize their users.
Is there a market for an agnostic “fitness data exchange”? No social, no analytics, just one spot that has all the integrations to all the fitness data sources and all the data consumers (including Strava). Wouldn’t compete with any of them, just a clearinghouse. Built on the concept of “you control your data”. Maybe set up as a non-profit joint venture funded by the ecosystem players?
Otherwise we just end up with a giant spaghetti web of one-off integrations between data providers and consumers.
I mean on iOS I would argue run gap is the closest thing with that app. It has a huge selection of other apps you can send your data too. In a round about way, Apple Health does this as well pulling in all the information but it’s difficult to know what’s in there. I have workouts all the way back to 2015 in Apple health pulled from other data sources and stored in there. Other apps to run need to read Apple health which right now doesn’t seem to have wide spread use at least with my apps.
It ends up being a political/competitive issue more than a technical one, as there are plenty of apps that can do some data integration. RunGap has the right messaging, but since they also offer some analytics/visualization, other apps that do the same might not want to participate. Same issue with Apple Health.
You’d almost need a branding where every data provider and consumer is “COOLNAME-compatible”, and the “COOLNAME” data exchange almost happens behind the scenes. You record a workout, it’s automatically loaded into the exchange, and you as a user can decide who it gets sent to. Maybe even the Garmins, Zwifts, etc would expose that data-rights-sharing directly in their own apps, but all control would be by an independent entity that ensures your data sharing preferences are followed.
It would be extremely expensive to run while extremely hard to monetize. A better solution would be for platforms like Garmin to have their own API so you can use third party plugins to export your data to whereever you want.
It doesn’t have to be expensive if you’re just a data clearinghouse. Storage is the highest cost. You could set it up like many of the open source foundations, where the major industry players pay to run the foundation but the governance is independent. It saves them having to maintain a web of one-off API integrations. It’s a win-win for the industry if they could look past their noses.
We’re seeing some companies try this, tryterra.co being one – though, I’m a bit skeptical there. For one, the pricing is kinda crazy for smaller companies (and barely functional for bigger ones). And two, I’ve talked to at least one company that’s listed as being compatible, but has zero knowledge of how they’re on the list, and certainly isn’t using an official API of that company.
Nice find! Try Terra definitely has the kind of functionality that you’d want in a fitness data clearinghouse. As you pointed out, the issue might be in being a venture-backed for-profit company… your “partners” might be reluctant to connect to you due to costs or competition, and your investors will push you to “monetize” the data more, taking you away from a mission of responsibly managing users’ data. The industry as a whole has to want to invest in an independent agnostic entity to broker fitness data. We can all dream…
The data exchange idea can just be a pure subscription model. Other apps and you can push data in, and push / pull data out. With some privacy settings on the data that can pulled out by each app. No complex analytics or visualisations.
There was something similar called EDI (electronic data exchange) back in the late 1980s. It’s a basic publish / subscription model that’s well understood.
Create a stable versioned API, employ industry best practice security and privacy controls and away you go.
Huh. Well I guess it’s their data, and they can decide how much to make it extensible, or not – they’ll have to live with the consequences though. I wonder if 12 months from now we’ll be looking back and saying, ‘man that was a dumb decision they made to kill off their overall API ecosystem’.
I’m guessing their management felt like too many other players were just existing solely off the Strava data and wanted to put an end to that model. Unfortunately, that’s a short-sighted move and it mean the beginning of the end for Strava. Time will tell….
Yeah, as in not the user’s data. Who apparently cannot in any way authorize an API client to analyze that data, or show it to someone else. Reducing apps to brainless third party client app. And what if the user’s mother happens to get a look at that third party client, or the user’s grandchild? Has the maker of the app broken the API agreement?
And no, “that’s not how it’s meant” does not matter. What matters is what it actually means, and if that’s not what they intended, tough luck for them.
Is it their data ? when you upload a photo to Apple or Google storage does that photo belong to Apple or Google ? the data belongs to you, yes they are the gate keepers of the data, and they need to keep it safe, but not allow you, to send your data to another platform for analysis is simply not correct
You created it, you uploaded it… you own it under EU GDPR as I understand GDPR. They are solely a Data Processor and / or Custodian.
They need to insure it is protected, not stolen, sold or inappropriately used, but they cannot prevent you from giving someone else access to it OR processing rights over it, NOR can the prevent you removing it, interrogating it, requesting its removal, deletion or correction.
I’m not a GDPR lawyer, but I do work in a dara environment and this feels like an overstep from Strava…
You will still be able to do whatever you want with your data, you just have to manually export the fit file and upload it wherever else. Strava probably thinks that many people will be too lazy to consistently do that, and that’s probably true. It’s the automatic pull through the API that’s being closed. Personally I wouldn’t be objecting if they made API pulls to 3rd party apps a paid-only feature but closing it basically entirely is very wrong.
Storage has different TOS than social platforms. Facebook has usage rights to anything you post (mainly for their algorithms to feed it to other people if you have a public profile). Strava probably has similar language.
Do you think anyone like TrainingPeaks or other could jump in that space and build itself as a data inbound/outbound hub replicating Strava API stuff and find ways to profit from that?
I’m a cheap bastard, but I’d gladly pay $2/mo for “data hub” services. Much more than that and it starts to influence my decisions WRT what watch I buy.
Intervals.icu has an open API and plans to integrate with as many platforms as possible. Certainly matching Strava’s penetration is a long way off. But the goal is to make Intervals.icu the best data and analytics hub for athletes, coaches and sports scientists. And that means keeping it open.
Lots of potential data hubs out there already (TrainingPeaks, Intervals.ICU, whatever the Apple platform is called, etc.). The issue is that most apps are solely built on the Strava API and would need to create connections to these other platforms – most of which are much smaller scale than Strava, might or might not have proper APIs, etc.
Strava has thrived because of the easy import of workout data from other platforms, the social aspect, and (for select users) certain functions (segments/routes, heatmaps, etc.) – and because missing functionality could relatively easily be offered by third party developers.
Will be interesting to see how the Strava user base reacts to the removal of the last point.
This is what Rungap does, it basically connects to everything and you can control where your data goes. However, it could be shut off by any of the APIs it connects to such as Garmin.
If I could use intervals to track my historical segments (I don’t care about other people’s segments, but, for a ride (or virtual race), I like to compare how I did today compared to how I have done in the past and look at what I can expect to do on a certain effort based on what I’ve done in the past), I’d skip out of Strava tomorrow and never look back.
If Garmin would accept outside data, I’d probably say close to the same thing about it (it won’t take TPVirtual data though).
Same with Training Peaks, though I’d have to learn to use Connect or Training Peaks more than I do now.
I’ve never been one for the social aspects of Strava. I used to use the heat maps to help plan routes, but I haven’t done a long or training ride on the road since getting hit by a car on a training ride 3 years ago.
We have reached out with a lengthly email to Strava for clarification and confirmation that these changes do not impact RunGap. They have replied that RunGap has not been identified as being in violation with their updated API Agreement and no action is required.
Nitpick:
“ow Strava seems to want to own the the “AI space” with it’s always-helpful AI insights that simply re-word my activity titles and tell me something vaguely positive but usually wrong.”
If a rising tide raises all ships, seems like they pulled the drain plug, or are at least letting the tide out for a while. Any thoughts on how many users this will affect ? Would need some data that they will probably not disclose, but you could do a survey of users that might be accurate if you get a bit enough n (unless that data is restricted/limited by this too, haha). Just curious about how many users they’ll lose over this. My sense is not enough to make a dent in their revenues.
btw did you get a break on the annual subscription rate since the move, or are you still registered in the overpriced US market ? link to dcrainmaker.com
So basically Strava claims ownership of any data that a user uploads to Strava from elsewhere – e.g. a Garmin recording – , to the extent that they will actively prohibit any further processing of any data where Strava has functioned as an inbetween hub? And this would this include basic calculations like training load? That sounds.. extremely limiting. To the point that Strava loses its raison d’être.
Cancelled my subscription. Time to get off the platform completely. I guess the super(ficial) “dark” mode feature was them adopting even darker patterns.
About time that users just leave Strava. Garmin connect does the same. If it wasn’t for checking on friends routes…, which I recreate manually anyway not using strava.
This is like kidnapping, no thanks
Farewell Strava
It’s interesting too see that while we’ve see so many Sports Apps being launched since the Zwift boom, to try and get some market share, we still haven’t seen one App trying to compete with Strava.
All it would really take would be an App with a better segment management system, maybe done via AI, which is all people really care about on Strava. The social media part of posting rides is easy…
But the problem was it was limited to Garmin watches. So not everyone you knew would be there if they have another brand. I think that was short sighted on their part–sync your apple watch to Garmin Connect and maybe you buy a Garmin when it dies.
I post pictures to my activities when it’s relevant (beautiful scenery, for example). I love chasing badges and challenges Garmin provides. I don’t care about segments – neither on Strava nor anywhere else. I don’t have anybody to send LiveTracking links to. And I don’t have a lot of people who would be interested in adding me back on Garmin and, coincidentally, I don’t care. It’s my training log, I don’t want it to become another social network.
Yes, but too many people use Strava so Garmin, whom I think came to the party too late, so Gamin’s version just seems to wallow there. This article has made me think ‘what do I use Strava for?’ answer, not much. I use Garmin for analysis and route making.
I went to the “Apps” section at my Strava profile an found this (translated from spanish):
“… There’s an app for every kind of person. Among such a wide variety, some allow you to analyze unique performance data or find a nearby friend who runs at the same pace as you…”
Maybe they should stop claiming something they don’t allow apps to do…
Seems sketchy for Strava to claim ownership over data that originated from me, and to place constraints on how I choose to use it, even though it comes via their platform.
@Duncan That might be acceptable for free users of Strava. The removal of that existing feature is not acceptable to me as a Premium subscriber – hence Premium subscription canceled.
Strava wouldn’t survive 6 months if that same limitation was imposed on them. What if Garmin said to Strava: Nah, you can’t do any analytics whatsoever on the data obtained through our devices and we give you no direct way to get this data. Users will have to manually upload their fit files to Strava if they want that.
Read David’s reply for your answer, almost all of Stravas source data cones from 3rd parties, if Garmin, Wahoo and Hammerhead did tte same Strava would be dead, they couldn’t process segments or anything else, it is utterly buzzard
Strava is just copying Reddit’s API playbook – to kill of any external API app integrations and to fully control their business’s data for AI. Reddit had a massive backlash but it worked for them eventually, I’m sure Strava expects the same.
Very different use case and Strava doesn’t restricts AI processing, it disallows *ALL* Strava data usage – basically, you can push data to Strava but can’t pull from it anymore.
I agree it doesn’t make sense, especially as Strava is really just a downstream app too. But I bet this was the MBA style thinking here. Probably looked genius in the boardroom PowerPoint. :)
I still remember Relive, we cannot even post links, and now even use 3rd party apps… Canceled my subscription for now. Strava reminds me of old Twitter lock-in and API changes, it went only downhill.
I just cancelled my Strava. If they want to play it this way, I’ll just stop using it. I can sync my stuff from Garmin to Intervals. I don’t need Strava. The leaderboards were fun, and the route building was quite good, but I can manage.
Strava must understand that they are using OUR data, and if I want to share MY data with someone else, that’s my choice, not theirs. I guess this is gonna cost them users.
Couldn’t stomach all the changes… finally switched off the auto-renew. They got my annual fee. In July I’ll find another platform, like Hybrid. There has to be a better option than Strava at this point. The last AI push, segment scrub and hazardous trail roundup killed it for me.
What is the definition of Strava Data ? the fit file I upload is not Stravas it is mine, all Strava do is store it, process it and use it to derive their own data. I can understand if they do not wish anybody to use their heatmaps or any other analytics they calculate, but to gate fence my data is not acceptable.
I’ve been a strava subscriber since day one they introduce a fee, I believe in supporting and paying for the services I use, this money goes towards providing a better service, when they effectively use my money to reduce my service, they force me to question my subscription.
It is due to review in 3 weeks, I’ve already cancelled it. Strava has committed suicide here, I also work in the software business, if a partner dumped this on me with 30 days notice I would instruct my team to not comply, but to remove integration.
Strava have forgotten something important, almost all of their content (certainly cycling) is provided by 3rd parties, only people who use their so-so App generate the content directly, they never truly own the data, very very sad.
The thing that always bothers me about these sort of changes with Strava is that their entire existence is dependent on Garmin, Polar etc. being an open ecosystem. I think it would be nice if Garmin et al would change their terms so that data used from their API must remain open.
I was one of the first 10K users of strava and early on encouraged others to join. Now I encourage people to not pay because it’s a company that is ridiculously tone deaf to its users.
strava seem to have really lost the plot. i guess they’re trying to find a way to make a profit out of the service they provide which is fair enough but in doing so they are destroying that service. its not as if strava themselves provide any meaningful data analysis, their value is in segments and social media.
anyway, i don’t see that it is “strava data” mine is actually garmin data which then feeds into strava so i await garmin’s reply in kind to strava. other people’s data may be from other platforms. some will actually be recording direct in strava in which case i guess it is strava data but strava are fortunate to have data fed to them from other platforms so should be open to feeding it on.
on a side note, the popup ads at the bottom-centre of the page keep stealing focus from the comment entry box. would be great if that could be avoided while maintaining your income
What a dick move. I not only cancelled my subscription, I also sent them a support email requesting refund for the ‘unused portion’ (renewed in September) of my annual subscription fee, as it’s pointless without 3rd party integrations.
I had been a Strava subscriber for over eight years, and just cancelled a few days ago because sites like Intervals.icu and VeloViewer have done a much better job implementing Strava’s “premium” features. I realized I’m not really paying for anything of value with Strava compared to the free version. This is probably part of why they are making the API change – if you can’t beat them, cut them off at the kneecaps, right?
Thanks for the heads up.
Tried to cancel my subscription on the website, it isn’t possible.
It only loads a blank page. Only way is to write an email according to that Chatbot supportthing.
We should all fill a complaint wich European Customer Protection, cancellation has always to be as easy as subscription.
stumbled over the same thing: It’s actually not “change membership” but “cancel membership”, the button you’re searching for. This will keep up the premium features for the time of your subscription and then fall back to the free tier. “Membership” means “Paid Membership” in Strava terminology.
That’s so crazy, and sound like it will kill off two of the main apps I use – wandrer.earth (has leaader boards and processes data) and activity fix (processes data to update information on the stava activity). And these are both so key to what I like to do, keeping me motivated and improving post activity workflow.
As a recreational rider, I’m tossing Strava into the same bit-bucket as my deleted Twitte… er…X account. They are free to leverage that as best they can.
Without Garmin, Strava would probably never have existed. It certainly wouldn’t have reached the level of ubiquity that it has. If Garmin pull their links to Strava, Strava is dead. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t; Garmin’s own Connect app does a better job of performance analysis than Strava does and it would be relatively simple for Garmin to give more access to the app for data from other data providers, such as Apple Health – especially if Apple decided that Strava was no longer worth supporting. Bring Polar and Suunto in and allow users to bring their data into whichever proprietary app they wish and Strava would have nowhere to go but bankruptcy. Maybe that’s what they’re after?
I’m okay with the demise of any company that takes your data and says, “this is now our data, and you can’t use it anymore.”
I stopped using Strava about a year ago. All I did during my workouts was plan a clever description for Strava. Every workout was a race, and I wouldn’t do things like re-tie a loose shoe or stop at a water fountain because I didn’t want to slow my averages. And then I’d spend leisure time counting kudos. I’m a much happier athlete now that I’m not performing.
Yes, that says much more about me than about Strava. But try a Strava-fast for a few months and see if the workouts don’t get a lot more enjoyable.
Someone guide me – if I cancel my subscription what’s my best choice for routing road bike, MTB, and trail running? Ideally also syncs to Garmin like Strava does (for now).
RideWithGPS. They have amazing routing, some analytics, and are bootstrapped and profitable. I’ve paid more to RWGPS than I ever did to Strava. Oh! And… if you send them a message asking a question, you’ll get a response within 24 hours (at least that’s been the case for me).
I’m still amazed at how much money Strava has taken on while other apps still manage to do more with less. It’s a Tech-bro Black Hole.
Well… that’s fair enough. The running will be a challenge since RWGPS focuses on cycling. There has to be a good running option out there already? Since I don’t run, I can’t speak to it, though.
Just go with Garmin. They have route creation and heat maps for road biking, MTB, and trail running. Many of their watches have course guidance, live segments, round-trip course creator, and popularity routing built in.
My guess is that there’s a TrainerRoad deal and integration announcement incoming and a lot of these changes are driven by TR wanting to build a moat around this data stream
TR CEO posting in the TR forum on this topic just now:
“This was crazy news to us, too. We’re still understanding the full implications; but for now:
Good news – We’ve been syncing Garmin Connect for a long while now. When we have both a GC and Strava ride file, we de-dupe them and use the GC .FIT file for processing/training/displaying. This is because Strava edits the data and takes a few things out.
More good news – We were already working on pulling rides from Zwift directly into TrainerRoad.
Even more good news – We had direct pulling from Wahoo on the roadmap, but now that’s obviously moved up to be worked in parallel with the Zwift integration.
For now, I recommend Garmin users make sure they have Garmin Connect synced”.
And this is a great example of what will happen all over the place. Strava have made themselves irrelevant, which (as far as I am aware) is not the most robust business model. In fact, the only people without a route through this might be those who use the Strava app to record their activities direct.
In theory, a deal with TrainerRoad would include exclusive rights to access Strava data, thus excluding alternatives. Not really a “moat” in the business/tech sense though.
Heh, in case you ever wondered what a super annoyed DCR would be like, watch this video.
If I were making a third party app, I wouldn’t even put half a thought into maybe offering a compliant version of my client, just focus on migrating to the hardware makers’ clouds, on preparing users that Strava connection might go away.
Wow, those people *really* don’t understand the market they happen to dominate, apparently out of luck alone.
November fools day?
This seems like the problem with having one main company controlling a space like this. They can pull the rug out at anytime. Will be interesting to see if they shoot themselves in the foot at the same time.
I think Garmin, Wahoo, and all the other device makers should adopt a similar policy – no access to “their” data without permission. Then immediately grant permission to other analytics platforms -Trainer Road, Training Peaks, etc. and cut Strava completely out of the picture, so the only data they get is from the Strava phone app. I doubt many of their users (an fewer still paid users) are using their phones as primary fitness devices.
I think if Garmin alone did this, Strava would die, and I doubt it would hurt Garmin at all, and might drive users to their site.
This will hack off Garmin users more than it’s worth – Garmin would be saying “you can’t upload to Strava automatically”. Garmin/Strava customers will complain . . . and Garmin’s response is – “Well Strava started it”?
Garmin (and other co’s) are pushing data to Strava, whereas Strava is preventing pulling data from it.
As a Wahoo user and TR subscriber, I just learned today that the only way my outdoor rides were getting to TR was through Strava, and that there’s currently no way to bypass this soon-to-be closed portal. I want to extend a big “FU” to Strava for this policy change, with an extra emphasis on the “U” for the short notice and timing.
But I also have to take TR to task a little bit for relying on a company that clearly has ambitions (however misplaced) to become a competing training platform as a conduit for their Wahoo data.
I hoped to get my app finished this year, but now I’m questioning the value. It uses a machine learning model and completes some analysis of your performance.
That they can do this without fear of having their lunch eaten by a competitor just shows what a monopoly Strava has.
Disappointing. I canceled my Strava subscription last week because the watered down heatmap is no longer useful when planning less popular routes (which only accumulate public tracks over more than one season). Luckily, all the apps I use are connected directly to Garmin, and I just severed the link between Garmin and Strava.
I won’t be missing the made up AI insights either.
Strava premium user from the beginning, along with my wife. If these changes are as bad as reported, we’ll cancel our premium accounts and use Garmin Connect. I also use Golden Cheetah, which is ridiculously powerful. Another company destroying their loyal user base.
The thing here it’s not Strava’s data – it’s my data. It’s pretty much the same with their very badly worded terms and conditions about what they can do with *my data* re them doing AI on it. Which basically says anything they want, even if they claim they don’t do that. Already I’ve stopped giving them most of my data because of that; this will just drive more people away.
Well here’s the thing. It’s not Strava data. My activity data is mine, I share it to the Strava platform. Their action means I will cancel my Strava subscription for which I’ve been a long time subscriber!
Madness.
Enough is enough. I just unsubbed, and wrote them the following support ticket, as well:
Hi all,
I’m canceling my Summit subscription after close to a decade. The “before you go…” page said that I ought file a support ticket if something is wrong, and I figured that I owed y’all the courtesy of telling you why in a little more detail. Basically there are two things that have pushed me in the direction of cancellation:
1) This new “AI” thing is deeply offensive in a lot of ways. I ride my bike to stay healthy, and also, as a means of transportation that lowers my carbon footprint. The concept that every single time I ride my bike, some computer performs an enormous amount of work and burns an enormous amount of power (“AI” now uses as much power as a small country!), just to write a sentence that I already knew that often contains falsehoods (the other day, I had a third-best 20k time, apparently; the “AI” told me I set a new personal best?), is absolutely insane. It is unhelpful and contributing to the destruction of our planet. I cannot imagine that the NPS metrics on the “AI”‘s helpfulness are above 0, and it is shocking to me that you have not disabled it by now until you could make it actually provide useful insight, rather than being simply patronizing to people who are paying you money.
2) Strava’s new plan to kill every single app that I use with *my own data* (and the data of my friends that opt in) is unreasonable. TrainerRoad will no longer be able to aggregate my Strava activities and analyze them; the Page Milling and On Orbits leaderboards will have to end; VeloViewer will no longer be able to tell me what percentile of a cyclist I am; my friends and I will no longer be able to go for a Tuesday night group ride and have some friendly competition by adding together segment times with a small app. These are not your data. These are *our* data. It is fundamentally hostile for Strava to tell me that I may not use and analyze my own data anymore.
I would love to keep paying money for a service that I love. I have paid for Strava before it even got me anything useful or different because it brought me joy to see my friends being active. I have stuck with Strava through the VC era of bad decisions. But enough is enough. I’m not going to pay for a service that fundamentally disrespects me. If Strava changes their minds, hey, I’m not up for renewal until May; I’ll pay by then if I can do what I want with my data. But if Strava keeps going down this path I just don’t see why I should be a part of it. I beg of you: it is time to care about your users! I want to love Strava and I am sad that y’all keep doing this kind of thing.
After getting the email from Strava, I canceled the renewal of my paid subscription, which I’ve had since 2016. Enough is enough.
Now I have to figure out what the alternatives are, especially for 3rd-party platforms like Wandrer and VeloViewer Explorer tiles, as well as route planning.
May I suggest checking out http://www.fetcheveryone.com as an alternative? The owner/developer builds analytic tools, route mapping, as well as user training based games. There’s active forums and blogs, plus training portfolios. See an example of my July cycling infographic.
It’s free to use (supported by donations) and has user voted feature development and implementation. Also Ian is a really nice chap!
That’s like recommending someone goes to a nursery when they can’t get into university. The analytic tools in Fetch are at the best noddy built on a decidedly iffy dataset. And as a solution it completely misses that noone is going to build an api to collect data from Fetch for their third party app which is the main issue Strava has created.
I am most offended by their justification. Doing this to protect user’s privacy. That is pure b****it. It is only done for Strava to earn more money.
I find it legitimate that they do not want to be a free data brokering platform. DCR is arguing “Garmin and others can not handle the scale at which Strava does it”. Fair enough.
In a similar way, many platforms with major content (NY Times, Reddit, …) do not want AI players to use all their data for free to train models. Fair enough.
But please be a management team that communicates honestly and transparently. Simply state that you want to earn an honest buck, no issue with that.
A company lead by a management team that insults its customers by lying to them is doomed.
The policy of Strava is quite interesting, because the data they use to create the heat maps, suggestions, routes, leaderboards is OUR data, not theirs.
I do understand that providing data to others can be somehow risky, but they are not in a position to decide what someone wants to do with its heart rate or power data…
This has given me the impetus to cancel my subscription renewal (although it remains active until it expires). They ask you why you want to cancel so I told them it was this decision. If enough people do it they may get the message
I like Strava but I cancelled my paid membership years ago over a similar move to this when they basically tried to claim ownership of all our data (despite the fact that all of this data comes, necessarily, from 3rd parties). The amount of data that Strava tracks on its website is minute. I’m fine letting Garmin send my workouts to Strava but I am pretty sure I long ago ended any data coming in from Strava to any other platform.
This is making me consider if I want to keep Strava at all. The only thing I “need” it for is getting data out of iFit more easily but I can download direction from iFit if needed. Now that I have Runn on my treadmill…that’s not even necessary anymore. I’m not particularly active on Strava at this point other than looking at other people’s workouts. Which…fine.
After thinking on it more…I went and turned off all of my connections into Strava. There’s literally no value added to me to Strava collecting it and since they seem to want to own my data…I’m good.
I took that a step further. I deleted my account and all the data that went with it, then removed their app from my watch and phones. It was only a secondary storage for me anyway, and I’m sure they won’t care because I’m not a paying customer but I have a feeling that there will be enough people doing this for someone to notice.
@TimmyB The only reason I haven’t done this yet is that I have some friends I follow on there. But not many so I may follow sooner or later. The thrill of a million kudos for a workout is long gone. I cancelled my premium years ago over this behavior so I don’t get any benefit from leader boards.
Most of my friends are on Garmin and my data is there and TrainingPeaks.
Strava must be looking at Twitter/X right now thinking “Look at them there’s no way they are going to lose their customer base by ostracizing them” as millions flock to Blue sky…
Veloviewer is the reason I pay my Strava subscription.
I will go where they go.
This is how I interpret Strava’s move here. Building a moat around their key selling point, to most users they offer a social feed of activities (which has a lot of value) all the other metrics/functions Strava offers are kinda meh but the reason most people keep using it is nowhere else brings everyone’s activities together at the scale they do.
The town square for all runners/cyclists/etc and we’ve all seen (X) how quickly that can be destroyed so they are making a very crude attempt to stop another company threatening their position. All the side effects on coaching apps is collateral damage which they think is worth taking.
I think most commenters here are a bit different to the bulk of Strava users, I think the vast majority won’t really notice or understand this annoucement from Strava. I’ve now taken steps to fully disconnect from Strava and use other services, but I was already moving in that direction anyway, the social aspect just doesn’t appeal to me like it used to and my sub ran out this month.
You may be right… but do you think those “social network” users are willing to pay the subscription? How will Strava make money? If they made API a paid feature I could understand it much better….
So what would happen if Garmin does the same thing and says to Strava:
You can no longer use any data from a Garmin device?
Would run Strava out of business almost instantly, no?
Maybe Garmin could step in to help all us athletes who use Garmin devices…..
Just a thought……..
The sad reality is that had Strava basically shut down offices five years ago (or make it ten even) and handed the existing tech to a minimally staffed maintenance team, I would probably have kept paying my subscription until old age. Few things they have done in recent years haven’t made me doubt that the money is well spent, it’s as if they were aiming for a customer that definitely isn’t me.
If a company that currently uses Strava API wants to keep their historical Strava data, they can IMHO refuse new Terms&Conditions, stop using Strava API and keep what they have.
On the other hand if they accept (for some reason) new Terms&Conditions, they must delete historical data.
These changes are not uncommon in my world of connecting to apps via APIs to collect and aggregate data. Unfortunately, multiple regulatory bodies across many countries quietly release privacy requirements for anyone using AI, so anything that references AI is entirely understandable and not within Strava’s control. Also, clear definitions of ‘use’, ‘analysis’, ‘insight’ and ‘enriched’ and ‘derived’ data are something we’ve seen. So, reporting how many miles ran last week is not an analysis but an insight. While this change seems disappointing, it aligns with many other data holders who aggregate people’s data. The fine line between collecting data, allowing data collection and regulating data is a harsh new world, which Strava is right in the middle of.
Then the reasonable course of action by Strava would be to a) request its users to provide updated consents to sharing their data with third parties, and/or b) insert additional privacy and data protection obligations on these third party users in the API T&Cs.
The fact that Strava has not done this is indicates that a) they are unaware of where users see the value in Strave (the data hub aspect), b) they are looking to implement some of these features themselves (eventually) and monetize that (e.g., the AI commentary, useless as it maybe right now), and/or c) they are lazy/don’t care.
I suspect it is a combination of all three.
The non-disastrous approach would be to create separate permissions for read (including share) and read (but don’t ever expose anything, not even a link to the Strava activity).
Sure, bad actors could ask for “small read” and use the data as if “big read” had been granted, but those will just as well ignore their agreement with Strava. The thing is, different levels of permission already exist (read, edit) and the same mechanism can also be used for different kinds of data use on what’s technically the exact same API.
Strava could have easily done this, perhaps even downgrading all existing grants and requiring explicit opt in by users. But they chose not to.
I suspect that the ultimate root cause is that Strava, trying to expand its user base beyond the core cyclists, at one point declared more casual users their clear priority (low likelihood of those becoming subscribers be damned, well, it’s their business after all). And this goal then slowly turning into a goal of increasing the *ratio* of casuals to fitness geeks, perhaps through promoting people matching that goal all too well or even through bad success metrics. Some of those hired/promoted for casual fit might even secretly get a little kick out of disappointing those annoying power users who stubbornly refuse to enjoy the synthetic positivity of computer generated praise for uploading the walk to the parking lot.
Strava seems to be working hard to kill of its app entirely. First there is the useless AI that basically gaslights you at every opportunity but in a super annoying fake “YOU DID IT!!” way. Then there was receiving a notification every time a friend uploaded an activity. Now there’s this. I don’t think they have an understand of how their app is actually used and so they’re pitching investors and advertisers on the wrong concept (which seems to be the data is the value). It’s used mainly for runners to do what runners do: compare their times to their friends, see others training and what gear they like (and the same for bikes). It’s basically a giant social media running club in an era when running clubs are booming. Yet, they’re making it harder to find what people go to the app to get: genuine interaction with people you’ve run or ridden with and races against. It’s utterly crazy to me. I’ve been subscribed at $12 a month for two years now. Today, when I couldn’t turn off the notification feature, I thought about cancelling my subscription and even deleting the app.
So Golden Cheetah will no longer be able to get data from Strava (analysis and aggregating)
Also all the new miles / areas add one like wanderer will stop working (aggregating data)
Ray, I hope all your analysis is from original device files. If you download from Strava you won’t be able to use your analysis tool to compare devices…
Here’s the funny thing: maybe this was really all very innocent and not meant to cause this backlash. It’s now a PR nightmare NO MATTER WHAT THE INTENT WAS! Do you remember when the Pixel Watch first came out and they did such a crap job with the release that 95% of the public believed that you MUST purchase a FB Premium subscription to use the watch? Despite that being hogwash, and that 99% of the “fitness” things most people would do with the watch were free, the ball got dropped and comment after comment was, “No way I’m buying that watch if I have to buy a subscription!”
Strava can backpedal all they want but it’s too late. They’ve engendered an insurmountable amount of distrust. Heads will roll.
Doctorow argues that new platforms offer useful products and services at a loss, as a way to gain new users. Once users are locked in, the platform then offers access to the userbase to suppliers at a loss, and once suppliers are locked-in, the platform shifts surpluses to shareholders. Once the platform is fundamentally focused on the shareholders, and the users and vendors are locked in, the platform no longer has any incentive to maintain quality.
That may be a valid point of view but I think the comments here show that it isn’t one which a lot of Strava users are going to adopt. It does seem like the poor messaging has caused them to shoot themselves in the foot with their user base/customers here, but time will tell I guess.
Finally a reasonable comment. Everyone saying you own your data, of course you do, but that doesn’t give you the right to demand Strava provides a service for free to pass this onto other applications. Developing and running the API for downstream services to consume the data is extremely expensive.
What would have been far more sensible is for Strava to only this availalable for paid subscribers, they are obviously struggling to find a way to attract more people to pay for the service and this would be one. Instead they seem to be want to alientate everyone who does pay for other services so are more likley to give them some dollars!
Except the GDPR exactly does that, Colin. It’s my data, I can take it anytime to anywhere I want. Strava has to enable this. They want to do that by having to provide the full archive of activities to me instead of using the API? Fine by me.
not one word in both communications even remotely points to what you raised; Strava earns money from users data – and that is fine; but they use the cover of data security to play to their agenda – kill other apps that make the whole Strava experience possible. Should privacy be a real concern, they would have added a consent box as required. But all ot works for is for Strava to have all cake for themselves
You can manually export files from Strava and manually upload them somewhere else.That’s not changing.
But to do it after every workout is likely too time consuming for most.
For example, I didn’t dive into it too much here, because Strava didn’t bother to answer my question about it…but Strava actually has a secondary class within the API called “Community Applications”.
The (Nov 11th) API terms specify that only “community applications” may display other data from users. But not regular applications (as ‘community applications’ support up to 10K users). These manually approved applications seem to be cases for mass event type scenarios (e.g. a grand fondo, a corporate wellness thing, etc…) or such. In those cases, you can display data to 3rd parties. Which of course, completely shatters the entire premise of their privacy argument.
Look, if they want to lean on privacy and grandularity, then cool – simply build in the controls into the API to do that (they’ve done that before, as does Garmin with numerous levers). If they want to lean on this being expensive, cool, make passthrough or whatever only available to premium (but no, it’s not expensive). If they want to lean on protecting from AI somehow, then again, put rules in place, or controls in place, to whatever in place.
Either way, they need to learn how to communicate. I’ve never seen a company repeatedly screw up communication so many times and so many ways. It’s just not that difficult, especially for a company in the Bay Area surrounded by a gazillion PR professionals.
all of you bad mouthing Strava on this forum. I’m reporting you to them. And their legal team, headed by Mitt Grates, will be coming after each and every one of you who does not profess their loyalty to the orange app.
I feel like it would have been way easier if they had just said “hey, apps, we’re going to start charging a premium licensing fee for any app with over 1,000 API calls / month” or something like that. Let those apps figure out a funding model to support it, strava opens a new revenue stream, and power users are left happy that they can still use their data the way they want. I already gladly pay for intervals.icu, and I’d pay a little more if required to use my data.
Does this also mean that fundraising websites will no longer be allowed to show the training/efforts that you are undertaking in pursuit of a challenge?
Wow. Well timed report from my perspective. This would impact how I use Strava, and I had been holding out on my Nov. 20 premium plan renewal tomorrow because…I dunno, this past year of Strava announcements isnt adding value and was waiting to see if something cool would be announced. Except now its the opposite. Thanks for the consumer report Ray. Really appreciate you having your ear to the industry ground.
I use SmashRun which is linked to my Strava account. It summarises and visualises my running data in ways that Strava simply does not, and is a great utility.
SmashRun haven’t made a blog post about this yet, but I’m guessing this screws them over massively?
At least I can link it directly to my Garmin account and cut Strava out of the equation…
Would love to see this checked on court. Is this even legally possible?
I’m the author/origin of the data. If I allow a third party like TrainerRoad to do analytics with my data no matter where they got my data from and it happens to be Strava that send my data with my consent…how can Strava even restrict something on that data?
This construct that Strava put in their terms and conditions should be illegal from the start because it puts them in front of their user rights.
You are still the owner of the data and completely free to send your data to these third party apps (directly/manually, via other platforms like Garmin, etc.). Strava is just not going to do it for you going forward.
The issue is whether this automatic sharing is a key expected part of the Strava service – I believe it is (at a minimum for Premium subscribers) and that the removal is galactically stupid move. But it is not a data ownership issue (in fact, you can even get all of the Strava has on/from you out of the platform quite easily as an archive).
That’s frustrating and potentially going to break a lot of stuff. Trainerroad should be OK though as long as you use their app for your indoor rides. I guess it will struggle to upload any outdoor rides that come in through Strava.
Are strava really trying to eff this up for everyone. Reeally?
I am not sure I was ever asked to opt in (or out) of Strava being allowed to use my data (historic or current) to train Strava’s own AI model. Given that Strava cites privacy issues for their changes to the API terms and conditions I am now concerned that this also means that I should be able to opt in/out in general.
Talk about trying to lose a customer base. What about charities that offer incentives for donations? Run 100km in a month etc. None of that can be used anymore.
You might give/have given permission for your data to be shared. That does not create an obligation for Strava to do so for you, let alone automatically via an API.
They have provided this as part of their service historically and clearly created an expectation that this is part of the Strava offering, but they are of course free to change their service offering.
And we are of course free to vote with our data and our money – I for one certainly will.
This is my entire frustration with Strava: I’m a paying user. I want you to succeed, Strava. But you keep doing stupid shit and it pisses me off. How can I be part of a voice that gets you to think differently?! You’re already awesome and you can continue to be while doing better, not worse.
Hello DC Rainmaker!
Since you are obviously tech-savvy enough to offer us this deep-dive into Strava’s legalese, here in a word is what Strava is doing (like so many others with / before it, e. g. the most egregious Fakebook– uh, I mean Facebook): Enshittification, or Platform Decay [or Platform Decadence, my preferred synonym]: coined by Cory Doctorow; see details here: link to en.m.wikipedia.org
I’ll use your link for my Amazon shopping coming up.
I have a very big problem with Strava doing this, notwithstanding the fact that I don’t use any Strava integrations – all of the data that I want on any given platform, I put there myself. As others have noted, this is _my_ data. Not Strava’s. Strava has a license (explicit or implicit) from me to use my data for the purpose of their service. They do not have the right to restrain me from giving a license to a third-party service to use my data in a similar way, which I am implicitly doing when I link that third-party service to Strava.
If they don’t want data going out, they should shut down the APIs that allow the data to go out. But enough of this nonsense of laying claim to data that isn’t theirs to claim, and placing restrictions on it that contradict the intention of the actual owner of the data.
The gall of them to tell ‘third party’ apps that they can’t use ‘Stravas data’ to for AI or share with others.
I would wager 95%+ of ‘their’ data is coming from 3rd party integrations. I mean who actually uses their app to record activities?
What if Garmin decided to implement a similar policy? I guess that would be the end of Strava’s usefulness real quick.
I used Strava as a hub for integrations but now I have to re-do all my integrations, and it makes me less tied to Strava and less likely to keep using it.
Some product guy must have deillusions of grandeur that Strava is going to ‘do everything’. What a disaster
Like most people I had all my data uploaded to strava and have any other platform get it from strava. Since strava started to do this kind of behaviour several years ago, I moved to upload my data to garmin and connect everything else to garmin, not strava.
I find it funny that Strava keeps saying “strava data strava data strava data strava data strava data” when in reality it is OUR data, the user’s data, not their data.
Im since 2014 on Strava and never had a premium account. Unneccessary.
I have every data to analyze on Garmin.
Garmin has a good and fully free web platform, and the firstbeat algorithm is probably the best on the market to analyze hrv, respiration, sleep data, training data etc.
The garmin web platform accepts free evenń 3rd party fit files for segment comparisons of course than without the deep analyze tools.
How do you think this will affect functions like strava segments on wahoo devices? They use the segment times to compete against your previous times, as far as I can tell that function is in violation of these new clauses.
That’s where selective enforcement comes in. Garmin and Wahoo will be safe, chances are their lawyers know each other from the gold course and so on, but if you are an Asian upstart device maker or something like that all bets are off.
I suspect it is all about AI and the future of online fitness & training, and the rest is just a smoke screen.
As the current AI based offerings of Strava are miserable at best, and it will take them a long time to utilize the wealth of user information they own to bring real value, they simply are doing their best to lock the competition, at the risk of loosing their most valuable assets: partners and (paying) users.
I’ve used Strava for years and years to be the central store of my activities across devices (phone, Garmin, Fitbit, Wear OS and now an Apple Watch).
I’ve not found another app that allows you to be device agnostic and store all your activities from various devices in one place. Does such an app exist because if so I’ll download my Strava data and delete my account
Ten year paid subscriber to Strava and I just cancelled my annual plan with them–and told them the reason why. Frankly I have been using Training Peaks more recently and just kept the Strava game going out of support for the old idea the CEO mentioned, Strava leading the way on fitness and health social media. If its a walled garden (or maybe walled AI farm) I am not excited to pay to go from participant to subject. Now if FORM Swim and Garmin can just work things out…
That’s infuriating as it will kill off a lot of small apps that I appreciate like Wandrer, Squadrats, ProBikeGarage and Veloviewer.
Strava is built upon the same freedom that they now dare to restrict for everyone else: To process the data they received from other sources and even monetize them. I could totally understand them to limit access to their processed data, e.g. Segments, or whatever limited analytics they do. But this is just a blatant attempt to kill off any 3rd party competition, especially the smaller ones.
Does anyone know of an open source effort to standardize API access to fitness data APIs, e.g. Garmin, Wahoo, Zwift, TrainerRoad etc.? The cycling community would benefit greately from such a project. It doesn’t make much sense for every data consumer to implement all these connections on their own. While bigger applications like Intervals, TrainerRoad, TrainingPeaks have the resources to do that, many smaller applications certainly don’t. It just adds so much unneccesary boilerplate to small projects, which is why Strava filled that hole in the first place.
I basically only use Strava for two things: The Heatmaps and getting data easily from Zwift to Intervals. So with this I cancelled, those heatmaps were getting quite expensive. As soon as Intervals gets direct connection to Zwift (which sounds like it should be soon) I will delete my Strava account entirely…
Strava will not just lose subscribers with this change, they will lose the data from nonsubscribers that adds value to the subscriptions. Those of us who have been playing with workout data for many years will remember the mess of shifting your data around using various import apps, until steadily it became pointless as Strava became the hub. I don’t intend to go back to the old days unless I have to, but I can easily just make TrainingPeaks my hub instead, as all of my data already goes there anyway. And if TrainingPeaks is the hub, why would I continue to send my data to Strava for them to monetise?
Anyone knows of any other platform that would produce smooth altitude graphs on the routing path except strava? This is literally the only thing I still use it for.
And what’s the problem??????
Let’s all abandon Strava and wait for the apps to connect to the Garmin, Wahoo, etc. apps…….when Strava is without customers, we’ll see what happens
I don’t use any 3rd party apps but i was paying subscription to support Strava to support the company, not really to use the perks that goes with subscription. As a software engineer I very much dislike their move and I’m no longer willing to support such company. So they won’t see any money from me going forward.
I’ll also try to raise awareness in my social bubble and try convince people to cancel their subscriptions as well. That’s probably the only form of feedback the company will listen to.
The API updates page now has some extra details (dating November 19th, so I guess they’ve seen your rightfully angry video) and it seems like some of the concerns were addressed, but if I were TrainerRoad or any other platform using users’ Strava activities to build training plans for said users – I wouldn’t stop making new direct connections to manufacturers’ (Garmin, Wahoo, Zwift) data hubs.
Yeah, their update seems to entirely sidestep things and use a lot of clever language.
At the end of the day, their update DOESN’T say:
A) Coaches can access data of the user (it says coaching apps can provide feedback)
B) AI tools can be used (it says, even more clearly, they can’t), the pretend line between calling it training versus using is absolutely silly, since they are more clear elsewhere you can’t even use machine learning according to their API
C) That apps can use/show data to others
And I’d argue the whole 0.1% *OF APPS* thing is entirely useless metric when you have tens of thousands of registered apps, of which 95% are likely long-abondoned projects for a handful of users by a hobbyist developer.
Ooh, wandrer.earth! I’m going to really miss that in the summer if it doesn’t work anymore ☹️
And same here, I’m not even a paid user of Strava but the reason I use it is to route data to other apps. I guess I would become a paid user if I could no longer do that, but to wipe it out completely just means I never use Strava
Seems like an opening for Trainingpeaks to jump onto, they’re pretty good at amalgamating data from multiple sources, much better than Strava at analytic tools and with TPV this would be another reason for users to go premium
Whether they would they have a financial heft to exploit this gap tho, I’m not sure
Strava would be nothing without the data it collects from our devices. I my case, Garmin Connect is my main training log, Strava is only a mirror of that data. If Strava doesn’t share with third parties, we shouldn’t share with Strava either.
Thank you Ray for bringing this to light. Everything has been said, so I have just canceled my premium subscription (was member since 2017).
With the ease of AI tooling, access to this data was going to see competitive products explode – instead of competing here they seem to have decided to shutdown data pipeline. It’s a sad echo to what happened with FatMap. I will re-direct this money to other more open platforms like David’s excellent intervals.icu.
Do you know which connected apps are in the 0.1% that Strava said they have pro-actively contacted which are affected? Is there anything to be learned from the set of apps they contacted or did not contact?
VeloViewer is saying: “We have always had a really strong relationship with Strava, and are currently working our way through these changes with them. We will let you know more when our position is confirmed – this is likely to be in a couple more weeks.”
Wandrer.earth: “I’m speaking with them about this on Wednesday and will report back”.
Statshunters: “StatsHunters was reviewed in the beginning of this year and after some email conversation was approved. I asked the Strava team if they can signoff on the policy. So hope I get a clear answer.”
Squadrats: “We are also not sure what Strava has in mind exactly. We will be talking to a Strava representative on Friday, and will let you know afterwards.”
Thanks for that. So sounds like they did not pro-actively contact those apps, so if Strava is telling the truth then those apps would not be affected….but you have to believe Strava’s pr statement, which I’m not sure I do.
This is totally puzzling.
– There’s nothing more annoying than companies saying “we’re here to help” and “we are working closely with partners” and then doing the opposite of that. If they don’t want feedback and have made up their mind on the decision couldn’t they have just said that and listed their the true reasons?
– if they wanted to stop freeriding of analytics or coaching apps, couldn’t they simply limit API access to paying users? Or make API partners pay?
– do they have AI Coaching features in their pipeline and are trying to make life difficult for de facto competitors?
– what do they want the API to be used for? Are there any use cases left? They might have just killed the API.
Flipping this around is there any outside force(s) driving Strava to make this move? I am no expert on this type of thing by in Europe things like GDPR have had a massive effect on how user data is processed.
GDPR is mostly about informed user consent.
As long as the user is informed and gives you consent you can handle their data the way users ask you to.
Strava could easily support some of the mentioned edge cases (sharing of private activities, ai training, etc) by tweaking their API rather than prohibiting them completely.
But if Garmin was to argue the same way and change their APi in the same way, then Strava would become useless.
Thank you for addressing this topic as well. When I read the information on Intervals.icu, I was honestly quite shocked and annoyed.
While I’m not personally affected since Garmin is my primary data source, I find it absolutely outrageous what’s happening here. These are my data, which I voluntarily provide to Strava for their use. Therefore, it should be my choice what happens with these data and what doesn’t. There should absolutely be options to determine how my data can and cannot be used via the API.
Even though, as mentioned, I’m not directly affected, I consider Strava’s actions extremely disrespectful. For this reason, I will be canceling my Strava Premium subscription. In my opinion, it has already lost its value for some time now, but this was the last straw.
Hopefully (even though I doubt it), enough users will cancel their subscriptions to make Strava realize that they can’t do whatever they want. They have no right to claim sole control over my data – data I only share with them for processing purposes.
I don’t understand how this works with Strava own Terms of Sevice which state in plain text that you own your data, but Strava has a license to it. Hence the activity data itself is not your Strava data, but your data stored in Strava. There is some derived data like segments, leaderboards, freshness/fitness etc, which actually belongs to Strava, and it will be in scope of these API changes, but not activities.
You can export data from Strava in bulk. When companies say you own your data, what they offer is a bulk “takeout” feature.
There’s no universal right for being able to export data via APIs. APIs cost a lot of money to set up and maintain.
It’s still a bad move towards their partners and they could have handled it a number of different ways.
the impact for me is that i assume people like yourself and ‘the quantified scientist’, will no longer be able to use strava anywhere in your analysis of actual data, very much playing into the hands of tech ‘journalists’ who pretend their giving us useful metrics, and also the tech companies who seem unable to improve their products
i’m wondering if it’s anything to do with the app(s) revealing the location of persons important enough to be political targets, (via their security detail), and this is the easiet, and dumbest, way to solve that problem
Fwiw, I don’t use Strava anywhere in my analysis of data, except in the rare case where a watch doesn’t export a .FIT file (e.g. Samsung devices). In this instance, I can still do that as I always do, by manually exporting the ‘Original File’ from Strava, which continues to exist.
Reason for cancelling : Strava api changes, I do not agree on Strava deciding how the data I upload is used by third party applications, as a paying customer it should be up for to me to decide. If that’s not the case, I am not paying any longer .
Subscription cancelled, data archive downloaded and account deleted – hate corporations that bully in this way – as noted by others further up, the way they treated Relive got my goat and this is just a total piss take.
This reeks of a panic move from Strava, trying to lock the doors before startups leveraging LLMs and AI out-innovate them. I’m going full assumption mode here, but it seems they’re clearly scared smaller players are building better, smarter features that Strava either can’t or won’t compete with. Instead of stepping up their game, they’re doubling down on control to stifle competition. It’s a classic case of protecting their turf instead of improving it, but it’ll probably backfire—users will go where the innovation is.
My message to Strava’s leadership team: Revamp Strava Labs! Assemble a group of engineers who, full skunkworks, build many features using LLMs and see what sticks! Users now know what accuracy to expect from such features, especially with the lab’s label attached. Eliminate all the bureaucratic BS and build features we love and get excited about. You have the infrastructure already (the data, the subscribers, the brand)—focus on creating new value instead of going full defensive and getting outcompeted down the line.
well, look what they came up with regarding AI Insights… if that is the level of innovation Strava Labs is capable of, I see mo future for expansion; it is literally like coping summary of ride data and puting it into chatgpt with command of: “say something about this”. Flyby, heatmaps – that was something fresh. Messaging via the app – maybe. But that is it.
I wonder if they got afraid of what TrainingPeaks didin last week(s) going for Zwift and making it work out of the box. If this model of conducting business continues – especially using doublespeak that is insulting to users intelligence – it will be time to gather all my data, download it and wish Strava all the best. Why it became so popular with companies to use TrumpMusk’on laungage and dropping the hammer on consumers to observe if the outcry will be so lound that they need to take step back… why not going with transparency? That is not the first time they do this…
I think it would be more fun if google updated it’s google play terms and services to “all apps in the play store must allow 3rd party app connections and use, with the user being able to turn it on or off”🤣
Thank you Ray, for that article.
In my case, I am happy, I am always uploading to TrainingPeaks, and also to Strava. That goes for Garmin and Apple devices, my Wahoo is becoming more and more obsolete, that is a pity.
TrainingPeaks is therefore not using any of the Strava data, and I might just cancel my Strava Premium subscription.
That whole thing is a real pity, after all, it is fun to see my friends’ workout and group rides on Strava, maybe in the future I will have to do without that.
All Strava users incensed by this should post a support comment to Strava. Eg
I strongly object to the recent api terms and conditions changes for third party app developers. If you want to improve privacy give me the option to control these factors but don’t deny them. Your ecosystem was part of the reason I susscribe to Strava this is giving me reasons to unsubscribe.
Mark,
that’s an interesting proposition.
To make it effective, I guess, these comments should be both (i) reaching Strava, and (ii) be publicly visible.
What would be an effective and coordinated way to do that?
If I understand all of this correctly, in case I download my data via api/ownapp to my server/db and do my own data analysis and visualisation/share to a coach/family/friends/homedashboard, I may violated the usage of my data stored on Strava?
Basically all my data on Strava should be used/seen on Strava only?
The whole thing is quite interesting, and it goes in steps:
1) We users create data through our activities,
2) Our devices compute and do some data processing with the data,
3) We or our devices upload the data to one or several platforms, including Strava,
4) These platforms somehow transform and aggregate the data,
5) Once step 4 is done, Strava then say, the data is Strava’s data and you, the user cannot use it anymore in the way that you intended from the start.
In the end it would be interesting to see, at what point exactly our data becomes Strava’s data.
Strava seems to work the same way, any of the tech companies, such as Meta and Google work with their users’ data, based on information assymetry. That means, they know what data they collect, they know how much it is worth and they sell that data. The users do not know the value of the data and are never told, how much it is worth. Indeed, these companies keep telling the users, that they are very ethical and do everything they can to protect the users’ data and so on and on.
The difference here is, that Meta, Google and the likes do not charge the users for providing a service to the user, they just sell the data related to the users, Strava instead charges for the services they provide to us, their users, and make a big story about the data, they think belongs to them and not to us, their users and subscibers.
I am afraid that this has been “Strava’s problem” pretty much since they one. What do they offer in fact? Why should you keep paying? Their so called “premium” features are sort of joke… Usually you can find better functionality on other platforms. The biggest things on Strava have always been “social network” and “data integration hub”. If they make the use of API for subscribers only, I would understand it (because they have costs associated with it). And I am subscriber for that reason already now anyway.
Strava necer really positioned hemselves on the market. They are not the training platfor, hell they are not! Nobody will be probably willing to pay for yet another soacial network…. How they want to make money?
@Joerg, so, for example, if Garmin decides to follow the same Strava logic, then already at level 2 it would be impossible to use data and send it to Strava since it is already “manipulated” by Garmin. Strava will have then almost no data, expect the one recorded via Strava app/phone so no, I will not use more than one device to record my run/rides just to upload it to Strava.
My subscription ends in August 2025 and for the moment I’ve cancel the autorenewing. Garmin Connect analysis are better than Strava. Athlete Intelligence is a joke, c’mon..
It’s absurd and the risk is to go back to close systems or bubbles. Sad day…
I cancelled also (auto-renew …. still some months…)
I am cancelling my subscription.This time because of the decision to close tools I use access to MY data.
The real value of (the core of ) Strava is socials and the historical benefit Strava has in the amount of people registered. That is the reason I pay for Strava!
The line of why someone subscribes has always been very very thin. I have never seen much value in the extra features, so this decision does not help the message I spread to other people coach.
Strava should bring *real* value to subscribers. Maybe you should have left the decision of 3th parties using the data, only to subscribers…. (even more non-ethical but at least there would be choice; and bills paid for consuming Strava data using API’s)
Some more feedback:
– the AI is just a stupid worthless repeater, which uses CPU/GPU time, which use electricity resources and as such earth resources
– instead of closing up on data access, Strava should be an enhancement and enriching of data: because it has the data on people that have been running the same segment, etc.
Instead of closing things.
NOT a smart move.
This it: a subscription should enable 3rd party integration, for non-paying users it’s difficult to argue why they shouldn’t be limited to Strava alone.
I’ve cancelled my 10 year subscription- similar to this post I didn’t really use the extra features, but I felt that the facilitation that Strava provided should be paid for.
Take that away?… I’m looking for another platform.
As I posted earlier, have a look at link to fetcheveryone.com
It supports direct import from all main devices, training log, analysis, route planning, competition/leaderboards, training / exploring GPS based games and there’s a social side. Active forum and blogs too.
It is free. Run and developed by one chap, supported by donations, you can back import your old activities. There’s a user suggested features section – they get implemented and rapidly updated with interaction from users.
Hmmmm, “interesting”.
A lot of apps provide option to connect directly to bigger brands (like Garmin for example). But…. For exampe Apple Watch becomes isolated. Integration can only be done on “client” side and that requires the mobile app(s). None a user can do about it. Even if there were mobile apps available, user must install all of them and in some ways use all of them to pull data from Apple Health. Now it was enough to push the fit file from Apple Health to Strava and from there push/pull to other apps (server side integration).
Exactly what I am doing: cycling recorded with Garmin; anything else recorded with Apple Watch. All goes to Strava. Either I accept that not all my data will now make it to all systems or I must move from Apple Watch to Garmin Watch (losing the LTE connectivity on the move). And some apps will maybe not work (properly) anymore (VeloViewer, MyCols, FoodCoach…..).
Now it did not matter what I used to record the activity as long as I was able to upload it to Strava from that device and/or app. So smooth….
That did not answer my question. For example FoodCoach is not on the list. JOIN isnot on the list.
Look Strava does not have to pffer APIs to be used as “data integration hub”. Of course they do not have to. The question is then “what do they offer?”. Yes, FoodCoach and JOIN (from my example) integrate directly with Garmin and maybe they will offfer direct Apple Health integration. Maybe they will not and I will need to decide if I am still willing to pay them after the functionality is limited (no data from Apple Watch). Is Strava to be blamed for this? No. Will I be willing to pay Strava for their “social network” feature? No.
As I said in my original comment: either the apps I want to use develop the direct connection (web based apps cannot in case of Apple Watch), or I accept not all data will be available in those apps, or I must reconsider if the given hardware is fit for purpose.
I am not blaming Strava and I am not angry with them. I do not understand that move. And I will definitely reconsider keeping my subscription should the “data integration hub” feature be gone.
Yet again – I am not sure how they can think they can earn more money by this. Yes, they may reduce costs because they lower the load on their infrastructure and they do not have to maintain APIs, but no way they increase the revenues.
I feel like this is in part driven by their new AI features. They want people to be attracted to their own platform. We should have sensed this coming when they started offering more “insights” with workouts. It’s very anti competitive and makes it seem like they wanna be the ones to sell you that premium subscription, to give you a reason to need their AI analysis over others. Instead of focusing on marketing a decent compelling product, they just decided to rip the data away from any competitors all together. Sink or swim for those platforms find your data elsewhere! Not cool.
Strava will notice that a huge amount of customers request a “bulk export” of their data today and are asking all over the web for the best and most open service/platform they can move all their data to, when leaving Strava.
Will Strava reconsider their decision then, or will they continue shutting down their whole platform?
I suspect you overestimate the number of users that will do this. This will go under the radar for most average users I would imagine. I doubt the fitness data geeks that comment on sites like this represent most users.
Most of the functionality of VeloViewer may disappear (unless Strava rephrases their whole statement another few times to calm down the community…) and I think many of them would notice if the stats basically goes all empty.
They won’t read it, but anyway if they discovered that, they could easily delete it as fast as they deleted all your URLs from all activities and comments without telling you.
I used to insert the URL to the zwiftpower event below every zwift race, that just disappeared all of a sudden.
Not informing users was a really crappy move. I placed the links to all my official timed race results on my Strava activities. Poof, all gone, without warning, I cannot search and transfer them to Garmin Connect. I will have dig through 10 years of emails and sms to recreate them. They could have kept the links but simply not displayed them, or displayed a text only version that was clickable.
Maybe Elon Musk showed interest in acquiring Strava, so Strava board members are trying to burn the house down before being taken over by good old Elon… 💥⚠️😂
BTW they may also very well play the game….
Imagine they would now announce that you must pay for utilizing the API. People would go mad. Buth they have costs associated with the API (software maintenance and infra operations). So they either must earn money or close it. So now they testing what the community response is if they choose to close it. And in few weeks they come back with the huge announcement: “We listened to your feedback and we found the compromise! We will keep the APIs open to subscribers! And by the way we must increase the price by 15%.” And the community will give them standing ovation. Mental games. Announcing the same today will make many of us to cancel the subscription and go for direct connection wherever possible, accepting some gaps in the integrations. if they scare us to death today by “we will shut down the APIs” we will see them as our heroes later when they ask for money to keep the APIs alive. Risky but smart move.
I uninstalled Strava a few months ago. It didn’t do much for me. Garmin has challenges, segements, courses, and leaderboards- for FREE! It feels like Strava thinks they are really special with an essential service. I say “Let ’em crash!”
This just seems like a market leader putting up a moat.
What’s Strava’s real problem, its trying to sell data analytics, AI etc, and other people are using Strava’s free data aggregation tool to get the data they need to provide those services in a way that on the one had is a way to get around Strava paywalling that content, but also, are providing better data analytics and insight that Strava.
Seems to me like a pretty classic abuse of dominance and competitive foreclosure play by Strava – its noticeable that this locking down the data and platform is the complete antithesis of the approach being forced on the likes of Apple, Google, etc. but European anti-trust authorities!
Strava is acting as both a data aggregator and a data consumer. No single company should control the aggregated data…to do so gives that company an unfair advantage over it’s competition. Which is exactly the point of this change. Strava doesn’t seem to want to compete… instead they seem to want to dominate the market by eliminating their competition. How very capitalistic.
Time for an independent workout data aggregation company!
I can see a very bright future for the service, let’s call it FCK_STRAVA_API, which for a given user will import raw data from Strava and without making any analytics, it will allow this user to export his data to any other app, as those data will become FCK_STRAVA_API Data, not Strava Data anymore (following Strava’s way of reasoning).
But does this only apply to data created through their platform by using their app or also on data uploaded from other platforms for instance garmin connect delivred through their platform? They seem forget – this is not their data!
I is not the letter I’d combine with Strava’s letter A. It doesn’t sink to the level of artificial stupidity I see elsewhere, but it’s close. I usually call it “artificial banality”.
Strava’s value for me is mostly the social aspect, in particular finding out about road conditions. I follow (with very few exceptions) people who live in my area and ride the same roads. From them I can find out how things are out there from where they’re riding and their comments. A lot of chip sealing was done on local roads this summer, and every year PA DCNR does “spring road destruction”, where they dump lots of loose gravel on the gravel roads up in the mountains (and usually those roads come out from under the ice in fantastic shape). So I get warned where not to go, or at least to take a full suspension mountain bike rather than my gravel bike. I also use ActivityFix and Wandrer, and I wonder what’ll happen with them. (I wish Connect has something similar to ActivityFix.) Most of the people I follow aren’t on Connect because they either use the Strava app on their phones (uggh) or a Wahoo head unit. If people leave Strava, there won’t be much point in me staying.
It combines training log, analysis, competition, GPS games, route planning and sharing with a social supportive side.
It’s free to use, supported by donations and independently owned.
Import from all main devices including coros. Previous history can be batch imported from elsewhere – if it’s a big file you contact Ian to get it uploaded. There’s also user suggested features implementation and development.
“Strava seems to be working very hard to kill off the community”
Yep.
Strava’s business model isn’t figuring out what features it can add for paid users, it’s figuring out what it can remove for those who don’t. It’s done that for nearly a decade.
If it had any kind of sustainable business model it would have been bought out by a bigger tech company a long time ago. Instead, shambles along like a zombie.
This is really disappointing. I miss the days when social media was all about public sharing.
My Strava sharing settings are as public as possible (I’ve had to revert some forced restrictions over the years): all my activities are public unless I’m testing a pre-release device, I contribute to heatmaps, I don’t add privacy zones, etc.
I wonder if screen scraping this public data is a viable approach now that the APIs aren’t?
I plan to do a better job of exporting and storing all my data outside Strava as a result of this announcement. Strava is my source of truth for my last 10+ years of workouts. If Strava bans public exports with such short notice, what’s to stop then from disabling the API entirely and holding all my data hostage on their proprietary platform?
This is ultimately about money, right? It always is. More specifically, it seems motivated by Strava’s inability to effectively monetize their product and develop new, innovative user-facing features.
Strava has the data, but everyone else is kicking their butts in terms of cool features and analysis. I see zero user-facing innovation, and I guess that ultimately comes down to tech, creative, and product development leadership at Strava. Why not invest in building in-app features that everyone loves? If someone has already developed a software product that is successful and popular, re-engineering it yourself is not a huge technical challenge.
If they can’t (or are unwilling to) develop features and innovation in-house, then why not follow the time-tested big tech strategy of buying and integrating your “competition”. That’s what Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc have been doing forever. How much would it cost to buy-out veloviewer? Is it worth the ROI?
Heck, why not just monetize the data access itself? A yearly commercial API fee for connected platforms that are monetized, and/or a tiny data transfer fee of like $0.00001 per MB. Have a subscription tier for $1/month that allows access by outside platforms. If you have (reportedly) 100 million users, tiny increments make for fast money. Even a $1 *PER YEAR* from half your customers is $50M!
They are the most-mind boggling business to me. Seems like they should be printing money.
If anyone in the tech space wants to develop a competitive product, I would jump at the chance to be a part of it.
I love everything you wrote. But strava would by veloviewer or stats hunter and just kill it. Like. Fatmap.
I don’t know if strava hates it’s users or just doesn’t understand them but for me, strava is a conduit to get better data visualization, like veloviewer or stats hunter. I really enjoy comparing year over year and looking at different metrics garmin has some of that but it’s not pretty. And no third parties really seem to be able to reflow garmin data. So I paid strava for it. But I just canceled (officially today with my end day Jan 4). If they want to lock down data I send them from Garmin. Cool. But I’m not paying for it.
Well, I do not like what they seem to plan to do. But… you still have access to your data; and we can not say that it is mandatory to maintain any API. I am just saying that I am sort of OK to pay for feature called “API for 3rd parties”. But if the feature is gone from the product (and I think they have the right to decide what their product offers) I also have right not to buy that product again.
I think the topic is (mis)interpreted like Strava is preventing us to access our data. That is in fact not true. They are changing their product and pretty much removing the feature. I still have access to my data, but the feature which is important to me may be gone soon. If that really happens I will stop paying them. And hopefully find another product fit for purpose.
The world leaders being tracked is not a Strava issue, it’s a lack of personal responsibility, education, diligence, and compliance issue. There is no Strava GPS device, it’s either a phone or watch that is tracking the location. Strava is just using data from another source to aggregate and display …. hmmm.
You can customize data screens, so I have my watch to automatically scroll through them during an activity. I have the climb screen displayed on activities like road biking, mountain biking, and hiking.
The Garmin Connect website has LOTS of information and options for routes and segments. I can create a course and choose to immediately send it to my watch.
Yeah, if you have a segment in GC, you can have it pop up on your Edge/Forerunner/etc and tell you how you’re doing compared to the KOM/your PR/your connections just like a Strava live segment. It’s a little limited in scope because there aren’t as many segments and there aren’t as many people public on GC (since it seems to be used as a primary data source and aggregator before sending it to Strava for the social features).
My suggestion to you would be to create segments on Garmin Connect where you think there should be one. It’s very easy to do. It has to start somewhere. I’ve created many segments around my area and have received “thank yous” from other Garmin users.
I should have mentioned that I am not a Garmin user anymore (that’s another story). I have a Karoo, so no automatic upload to GC. I could upload to it manually I guess, but certainly there are no segment download options from GC to my Karoo. I have about 120 Strava segments, probably about 30 of which I use regularly, so even if I reproduced them in GC, I could not get them onto my Karoo and race against them or my PRs.
Oh well….looks like Strava has me trapped for the time being.
Curently my Garmin is linked to my Strava account for purposes of relaying the information to New York Road Runners to confirm when I have completed a virtual race. NYRR utilizes virtual races for the purpose of gaining guaranteed entry to their major races. Is this change going to impact the information shared with NYRR?
Ray – thanks for your thorough analysis on this! Have you heard much about the European Data Act that will be official in 2025? It’s kind of opposite of what Strava is saying here and I don’t think this agreement will be enforceable in Europe. Essentially, you have the right to allow 3rd parties to access your data from a digital platform like Strava, and then Strava would by law have to provide the data to that 3rd party.
What’s infuriating about this is it’s not Strava’s date. It my data, our data that we gave to Strava. Heck much of it is Garmin/Wahoo data before it’s Strava’s. Maybe they want to protect their unique IP around Segments and Leaderboards etc but I tend not to view or analyze that in other apps anyway.
Just imagine if Garmin implemented the same API usage rules – Strava would be utterly out of business!
As soon as I saw this I thought of the app Trailforks.com. In their connection toolkit page for users they really make the point their site works better with a direct Garmin upload versus using Strava. API overuse being the main issue. Makes following their recommendation all the easier. I wonder if Garmin and other hardware companies will capitalize on Strava’s misstep? You’ll note in their instructions from the screenshot, they imply they’d like their users to treat Strava as an endpoint for data. Strava is going to turn itself into a data dead end.
To be fair. Outside isn’t the best example. They bought a ton of stuff and try to bundle it. I stopped using trail forks and Gaia when they fell under the umbrella
I wonder where this is coming from. Something you NEVER talk about it is privacy of your data. In fact, I don’t think you’ve mentioned it once in all the years of following you but A LOT of people are concerned about their data and how it’s used. States and the EU are too.
I know you come form the tech side where there is NO bad use of data. ( I will note the ad trackers on this site are ridiculously numerous and do you don’t have what is commonly referred to as a cookies banner)
I will note there is no major federal privacy legislation in the US – so that can’t be the source of the changes. Nor are any state laws effective as of Nov. 1.
I think for points 2 and 3 you are flat out wrong. My own company we strict the use of data for third-party AI models for lots of reason. More and more companies will be doing this after AI scraped a ton of data (possibly illegally or in violation of agreements/terms)
companies are become concerned with data that is leaving their environments. (I know it is user supplied data)
I think you also are misleading the readers on point 3. When you refer to “you” you aren’t referring to the individual user.
California (not to mention the EU) are becoming extremely aggressive in going after misuse of data including the use of AI. I think you spend too much time in your tech bubble- the comments prove it.
And the irony of this “And more hilariously, they added that any users posting to their community hub forums that are “requesting or attempting to have Strava revert business decisions will not be permitted” and summarily deleted” when you’ve deleted such comments on this site.
Ahh yes, our resident troll has arrived (you know you’re literally the only one, right?).
“In fact, I don’t think you’ve mentioned it once in all the years of following you”
I talk about it quite often as it’s required. Though for the most part, within the sports tech segment, these companies are actually quite good with your data (in comparison to most other companies). Thus, it hasn’t needed constant coverage. Even Strava, is actually quite good when it comes to Privacy. Rather, it’s people not understanding the implications of their actions that gets them in trouble (e.g. posting routes from secret military base). That’s something covered numerous times per year by most government security course refreshers, as always, you can’t fix everyone.
“I will note the ad trackers on this site are ridiculously numerous and do you don’t have what is commonly referred to as a cookies banner”
Also not true. You’ve simply clicked agree at some point. Off the top of my head I think we require re-consent every 45-60 days. Either way, you can validate this easily yourself to see the cookie warnings that take up half the page, by opening an InPrivate window to the site again.
“and summarily deleted” when you’ve deleted such comments on this site.”
I allow all the constructive conversation and criticism you want on this site, constantly, for years. Roughly 100K comments or so per year here, plus YouTube. However, my rule is simple, and has remained the same since the beginning. If you post personal information about someone (me or others), the comment gets deleted. If you can’t keep conversations civil, and resort to name calling or similar, your comment gets deleted.
For reference, you’re the only person in the last few years who’s managed to get comments deleted. Just…you. Kinda amazing when you think about the hundred thousand+ people a year, and only one of those people can’t follow basic civil conversations. Have a good evening!
I don’t understand it. In a global market integration is key to success.
By the way, most of the data isn’t generated by Strava, but by external “apps” and equipments. If, for example, wahoo decides to apply the same rules to Strava from their side, Strava couldn’t generate PR’s or KOM’s. If I was involved on the decision, I would gladly serve them with the same recipie to see what would they do.
I am using the Strava API for my own personal application, and reading those terms, I would no longer be allowed to use it in that way anymore – not that Strava cares about a one person project, but still.
One other thing about the Strava API that has been bugging me for years, is they removed the ability to change the visibility of an activity via API (public, followers, private). I can understand that it a sensitive thing to allow a app to do this, but it could be guarded by a check-box that you need to enable when authorizing a new app to link with your strava account. Many users have their activities on “Private” by default, and have some certain rules/patterns as to which activities can be made visible…There have been requests on their forums for years for this feature to come back, but no efforts were made by strava.
To work around the issue, I wrote a small application that logged into strava like your browser would (using username + password!), and edited the activity visibility like this, circumventing the API at the cost of needing the strava user credentials on hand.
Since 2024-11-01, strava has updated their website “anti-bot” measures, using Amazon’s Web Application Firewall (Amazon WAF), which makes it a lot harder to “fake a normal browser” logging in – the whole approach becomes highly tedious to keep working. This alone already had me wondering if I should continue to bother with strava, as my activities are private by default and I am annoyed at having to edit them on strava manually (according to the rules I have as to which activities I do share).
Adding insult to injury by also changing the terms of the API usage like this will have me deleting my account.
Anyone here knowledgeable about EU consumer law in this?
When I paid for Strava last May it had the capability to feed data into statshunters and veloviewer, the primary motivation for using Strava. Now they effectively remove this capability.
Can I cancel Strava Premium and demand money back for the 5 months until next May for removing an essential feature of the product?
While I don’t think it might have much legal standing it’s worth canceling and asking support (perhaps ask first).
Countries have been a bit terribile for consumer protection for this type of service. A TV company can kill services you bought the TV for, a game can loose its online servers. Which (UK consumer organisation) is looking to change this, as are others.
I’m not sure about EU law. But for example in Germany you’re allowed to cancel a contract if the other party changes the basic terms (usually that means a price hike) or if they change the product in a way that removes its usability to you. The latter *might* apply here but it’s certainly not black and white. For example, there was a big debate among legal experts if customers could cancel their Pay-TV subscription if the provider lost the rights to top flight soccer games.
Well, this is insane. As a result of this I have just cancelled my subscription. The data, as far as I’m concerned, is mine (they’re just holding it for me), and if they’re going to lock it away… nah, I’m out.
Pontifications:
As far as I’m aware the idea that the data is basically mine is also the thrust of consumer laws like GDPR. Of course, they can add terms and can argue it’s in their interests. Of course, I can choose to not pay for their services. I’ll miss some bits, for sure (I don’t use lots of other apps, other than as feeders), but I’ll live and as a bonus save a bit of money (tempted to give half my next sub fees to something like EFF – this isn’t necessarily illegal, but it does remind me that companies generally don’t have our interests are heart.
Sorry, some typos there.
I might add that on the cancellation reason I choose other and commented how I don’t agree with these changes and that was why I was cancelling (I made a point I won’t support a company that acts like this), then I linked to this story.
Voting with my wallet – the only thing I think I can do. And I may only be one person, but on a recent Carbon Literacy course I went to I saw the best quote, which kinda applies here
“I’m only one person, said seven billion people”. (attribution forgotten… not me!)
Oh, and at the risk of spamming this comment section: MASSIVE thanks Ray, for this post. You _are_ on the consumer side (as well as being aware of the business implications of this). 🙏
Curious as to whether a class action lawsuit against Strava may be valid. After all many folk myself included, paid for a service that has now been crippled.
I’m a 10+year subscriber and just cancelled, telling them they are committing corporate harakiri.
I stopped sharing data with Strava way before this incident due to the fact that Strava requires the removal of all synced data to a connected 3rd party upon disassociation – even though said data was mine and originally recorded independently from Strava. I use https://intervals.icu as my hub. I don’t really care for Strava at all or depend on it.
Very disappointed by this. As an indie developer who builds projects for the love of sport and the community, I’ve always appreciated how Strava’s API has promoted innovation and supported an ecosystem of tools for athletes worldwide.
About two months ago, I launched an (AI) app called Roast My Strava. It gained a lot of early traction and brought together thousands of athletes in a fun, lighthearted way. However, when it hit the 10,000-user limit, I faced weeks of silence from Strava regarding my increase requests.
They eventually responded and granted the increase, but it came just before this announcement, which feels like a significant step backward for those of us trying to create meaningful tools for the community.
I’m frustrated but still optimistic about building for our community, though I’m rethinking how to do so with less reliance on Strava. I’d love to connect with other developers navigating this change—thanks to everyone who has shown support so far!
Protest time?
Anyone else reading this… consider doing what I just did. I renamed my last activity to “⚠ Strava… what are you doing? ⚠”, and I’m about to post a black-out pic as my highlight (only) picture for that activity. I’ll be kinda and use a 1px by 1px image if they let me so I’m not costing them server space 😊
Having just looked at my tech-sites there was a story on ArsTechnica.com (which references Ray, as all good sites do 😁), and I remembered one thing and thought of another as I’m getting more and more annoyed by this:
THIS: “posts requesting or attempting to have Strava revert business decisions will not be permitted.” sounds like dystopian sci-fi. I like the genre, I just don’t want to live through it.
And, as I noted on Ars’ comments: “I’ve never really thought CEOs should resign over all mistakes, but this, for me, is a CEO-shouldn’t-have-allowed-this-and-should-now-resign type level”
[https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/fitness-app-strava-is-tightening-third-party-access-to-user-data.1504203/post-43322772]
@Ray – The biggest value-add I’ve ever gotten from Strava is from their heatmaps when traveling. As an aggregator I actually think this is one of their most valuable features. Is there another service out there that provides similar quality heatmaps? I’m on Garmin connect so I can use Garmin’s heatmaps but obviously a more generic service would provide better data.
I’ve been a ‘free’ Strava subscriber since ~2013. I went ‘3rd party’ when Strava removed a lot of access to historical data unless you went ‘pro’ (First tried Suunto, settled on Garmin). AFAIC, Strava is merely a social media tool that I use to see what new things my friends are up to and watch my segment performances.
I always knew they were using my data and considered that a fair swap for me never having paid for membership. Maybe it’s time to rethink that.
I’ve cancelled my strava subscription and posted on this thread about my utter disbelief of this, however I have been thinking about this, are Strava really this stupid, well it seems so, but it got me thinking.
Strava gets most of its data from 3rd parties, and I recall a stat from Ray I believe, which hilighted that Garmin are by far the biggest source of data for Strava.
If Garmin told Strava they can no longer allow data sourced from Garmin to be reused (sent to a 3rd party) this would force Strava to implement such a stupid change, I’ve certainly not heard of Garmin doing this, but has anybody checked this possibility out ?
Why will Garmin give Strava the data but then not allow them to give it to anyone else, especially since Garmin has it’s own API which smaller 3rd parties can use to get Garmin data directly from data?
The stupid thing is that if Strava get’s away with this, they have given others an easy way to cut them off. When device manufacturers release their own AI tools, under the guise of privacy, they can at the very least prevent any 3rd party (ie Strava) from using device data via their APIs for AI training or AI tools.
Well, I think the time has come to cancel my premium membership. I’ll continue to use the free Strava for the social aspects, but I don’t see any advantage to paying the premium fee if they’re intent on crippling it’s functionality. It’s a shame that they seem to be hell bent on crippling its functionality with 3rd party apps.
I tend to agree with the idea that Strava is mostly a social app. I can understand the points Ray is making, but I’m not that compulsive about my training metrics and etc. I have a Garmin watch and that gives me the basics I need to monitor my training.
Is it coincidence that Strava just released beta “insights” features to subscribers that use AI to analyze and comment on activities and then disallow anyone else from using AI or analytics on user data?
This is some lazy reporting on DCR’s part. I wish DC Rainmaker had bothered to look at an older version of Strava’s API terms before making his video. The whole paragraph about analytics showed up in their API terms between 2018 and 2019.
Here’s what Strava’s API terms were in 2019: link to web.archive.org
I honestly don’t know what they mean about analytics, but that block of text has existed for more than five years with no consequence. Please do better.
Seems like you didn’t read what I wrote. I specifically said “While portions of the above entry existed in previous API versions, this paragraph has now been expanded to be more precise.”
Also, seems like you didn’t even read what you thought you had, because it expanded quite a bit to include the word “disclose”, as well as the aggregated and non-aggregated bits. As you said, please do better.
I’m done. Was on the edge after they killed fatmap but didn’t integrate any of it into strava. Now, I know they’ll trickle it in over the next few years making it seem like they are doing big improvements. But they should have flipped the switch the day they killed fatmap. This api thing might be reversed but the fact they even came up with it shows how little they care about subscribers. I’m done. I’ll do ride with GPS and may actually finally pay for Intervals.icu now that I am free of strava (a nd likely veloviewer and any other small associated app fees linked to strava).
The only reason to use Strava was to push data to apps like VeloViewer, Wandrer.earth, Statshunters, Squadrats, etc.If they can take the data directly from Garmin then Strava will be really pointless.
Maybe people should ask for a right to be forgotten request and that it covers all data including data which may be aggregated with other users or used in training AI models?
“I feel at times that Strava wakes up each morning, heads to work, looks out over the San Francisco Bay from their offices, and asks itself: How can we anger our users and partners today? How can we make everyone’s life more difficult today?
Every time Strava does something good (such as last week’s night heat maps), they immediately go and ruin that good love with something to upset their user base. And obviously, that’s their prerogative as a company. But it just seems that no company in the sports tech space spends as much time and energy proactively trying to anger their users as Strava does.”
Spot on – especially when you are a paying customer
Was on the fence regarding cancelling my long standing subscription. This is the tipping point. Thanks DCR for cutting sucincintly through Strava’s PR word salad.
The best thing? Head of Product at Strava (Matt Salazar) has to approve any Strava followers on Strava. If you need proof that they lost the spirit of the Strava community, look no further.
You can ride my wheel, but only if I approve you. You can run with me, but only if I approve you. It’s just sad.
99% of Strava users don’t require an approval for follow. It’s very strange to me that the lead Strava product employee (who leads by example) would require this.
Strava built is company on authenticity. This is the anti-thesis of being authentic.
To be fair, if there’s anything I’ve learned from The Internets over the last few years, is that there are some people that are incredibly angry at Strava. Not me-like ranting, but, legit very angry people. Those people do take it out on any Strava employee they can find – regardless of whether or not that Strava employee has any control over those decisions, or deserves such feedback.
Frankly, I don’t blame some of them from having more private accounts. Just like my wife does.
I object to the ownership claim Strava has taken with the term “Strava data”. They are mostly talking about *user data* that we have chosen to share with Strava. I would bet that most of the activity data does not originate with recordings in the Strava app but instead comes into Strava from 3rd party integrations with Apple, Garmin, Polar, Coros, Suunto, et al.
Only metadata like leader boards or possibly routes is really distinct to Strava. However the user base also creates the routes so that’s pretty dubious also.
I swear this is what happens when companies have folks making decisions who do not actually use their products or platforms.
Somewhere a lawyer told them these new terms were the best way to legally achieve their goals, without understanding the impact on the Strava community or its business—because they don’t know the community or users of the product or services.
Somewhere some developer pushed out changes breaking fundamental usage features because they don’t eat their own dog food, and don’t know how their “tweaks” impact the ecosystem as a whole.
It’s bloody embarrassing.
I will say, I’ve benefitted from never really getting on the Strava bandwagon. Thankfully.
Apple Health, TrainingPeaks, and a dash of FinalSurge (the latter two paid), plus RunGap to tie them all together (which may be impacted by this, but also I don’t use Strava, so not for me, thankfully!).
A lot of companies who have vibrant, expansive communities built in part on the backs of APIs allowing third party developers to extend their offerings have grown mature, and then brought it outsiders who don’t get it and try to monetize it.
The Unity Game Engine licensing kerfuffle is one example. Some of how Reddit handled its API pre-IPO is another. Facebook has done this multiple times to its API.
I can get where Strava may have issues with some of these third-party services hitting their API too heavily, and causing resource drain. Hosting Strava isn’t free. Then again, you can require companies to PAY for API access. Many commercial cloud services used in business to business settings do that. (In fact, Reddit did this in part . . . although their pricing structure was arguably designed to kill 3rd party apps.)
But that’s not what’s going on with Strava.
Finally, if their PR statements represent their true intent and goals, then fine. Maybe they do. Maybe the goal is *not* to hurt 3rd party apps, but to protect consumers.
And, if so, they should fire their lawyers, because their lawyers wrote API terms that don’t meet their stated goals. Their lawyers wrote API terms that will destroy their community, and possibly their value.
Look—Strava needs to make money. Some folks pay for the premium service. By all accounts, it’s not bad and is comparable to many other fitness tracking toolsets out there (like TrainingPeaks!). There are strengths to it, and weaknesses. It is a good tool for some, not for others. Great.
Maybe they need more revenue. I get it. Cool.
But why either lie about it, or be so ignorant of your own written terms, and what they mean, that you don’t understand the impact?
I’ve been way down on mileage due to a bad cycling accident with a deer. Recovery hasn’t been fun and has been going on for way too long. Just getting back on the bike in any fashion has been a joy and it has been fun to basically just ride for the sake of riding. Along the way during this recovery, I took advantage of a good deal and purchased my first ever E-bike just because I could and because it is a full squish eMTB and the riding position allows me to take some pressure off the broken bits that still remain.
However, in the process of having some fun I ended up top 10 on a local climb and OMG you would think I have become the lowest piece of pond scum shit on the planet because I did not “declare” I was on an ebike
I didn’t even know it was a segment
At first I thought you know what, I almost died…FUCK them. So goddam what, instead of being happy for me for riding again they are going to give me shit about 7th damn place on a meaningless climb in a meaningless community in a meaningless life that NOONE is getting paid on?
like seriously,
Then I started thinking about all the “packs” of riders owning all the non-uphill segments because of drafting and nobody cares about that
Then I started thinking about how I feel like I “must” monitor and give kudos to people I follow every time they take a walk, or go to the gym, or take a piss or whatever less they get “offended”
I wasn’t using Strava for anything other than to get my rides into intervals.icu
so right, wrong, or indifferent, I have used this recent controversy to say fuck it all. The account is GONE.
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It was time to leave Strava several years ago when they started locking your data behind a paywall. I exported my data at that time, deleted my account, and haven’t looked back. This latest move by them just shows that my choice was the correct one.
Isn’t Google getting in trouble for making a monopoly of the market? Strava seems sus under that lens.. I guess I’m supposed to email them this.
Realistically, Strava is nowhere near a monopoly.
Strava has a very dominant and, really, a unique position.
There are numerous other options for activity tracking. They are big, but not unique.
> Strava has a very dominant and, really, a unique position.
> > There are numerous other options for activity tracking. They are big, but not unique.
Strava’s *position* is unique. I can’t speak for anyone else, but every runner I know uses Strava. Most run with a Garmin, but many almost never use Garmin Connect (not even for looking at their own activities).
I don’t know anyone irl who uses Garmin Connect’s social features.
Outside of strava, I also think it’s fairly uncommon to use secondary (*) platforms for data analysis or activity tracking, like veloviewer, smashrun, metathon, or runalyze. I’m fairly sure I’m the only runner I know (irl) who’s even heard of those apps/sites. Then again, that type of person won’t be affected by these changes at all.
(*) By “secondary” platforms, I mean platforms other than the app associated with the recording device (e.g. Garmin Connect, Apple’s Workout and Health apps).
> Strava’s *position* is unique
(“position” = market share / userbase)
I have a good number of friends that regularly use Garmin’s social features. We have frequent challenges, we upload pictures to our activities, and have comments about local segment leaderboards. I actually prefer Garmin’s features to those of Strava. Garmin’s maps and route creator feel much more polished when compared to that of Strava.
Don’t worry we’re welcome back at any time :)
If you train for real Strava is not the tool. You will use Trainingpeaks or something that actually helps you improve every day.
Strava is for getting kudos from your pals.
> Garmin’s maps and route creator feel much more polished when compared to that of Strava.
I have to vehemently disagree here. I think the Garmin route creator is terrible compared to Strava’s. For me, Strava’s route creator beats Garmin’s by a mile on usability, aesthetics and features. I actually wouldn’t refer to anything that Garmin makes as “polished”, no offense. To me, a Garmin running watch is a great tool for running (although there are always issues), and the Connect app/website are ok when I want to look at certain data (only because the exact data I want is unavailable elsewhere, not because Connect is a great experience). “Polished” is the last word that would ever come to mind when I think of that stuff.
Even the limited route editor on the Connect mobile app doesn’t seem to work properly when it comes to do the one of the few things it can apparently do, which is delete waypoints. For example, if I try to delete the last waypoint of a 24 km run, the Connect app will recalculate the course so it ends up being 38 km. If I try it again, but first change the routing method to freehand, the course recalculation process seems to go on forever (I gave up after waiting a couple of minutes).
Meanwhile, the course editor on the Connect website doesn’t really have a way to edit waypoints as a list (as in the Strava website, and allegedly, the Connect mobile app) — they can only be edited on the map itself, which is a bit more limiting. I don’t see a way to add a waypoint from an address, which is something that Strava supports.
I could be wrong, but in the Connect route creator there isn’t an obvious to traverse a loop more than once, since clicking on the course track always adds a new waypoint. When you click on the course track in strava’s route creator you have the option of either adding a waypoint, or extending the course to the that point. Not that it’s a great experience to navigate a course with a loop that’s repeated more than once, but is also just one part of the overall course, but that’s another story.
As far as the social stuff goes, everything that Garmin tries to do, Strava has already done better imo. (For example, segments.) To be fair, I think Garmin knows it will never catch up to Strava, so they probably don’t put a lot of work into it.
If you stick with Garmin’s social stuff and never use Strava, you also miss out on connecting with people who use Apple Watch. Let’s face it, most people under a certain age who are just casual runners or cyclists are def not going to use a Garmin, especially if they started within the last 5-10 years. I know a few casuals who switched from Garmin to Apple, and plenty of ppl who never used Garmin at all. A lot of ppl who don’t use Garmin don’t even understand why runners wouldn’t just Apple Watch.
> If you train for real Strava is not the tool
> Strava is for getting kudos from your pals.
That’s what most ppl use it for. Lots of ppl run exclusively for likes, too.
But I know a few ppl who can run a 2:30 marathon or win a local 5 miler. They’re not elites, but they’re not hobby joggers either.
They exclusively use Strava. Although they wear Garmins, they prefer to look at their data in Strava as Connect is too “complex”. They don’t use any other apps or websites, like TrainingPeaks or runalyze.
To me, it says a lot that there are Garmin users who apparently almost never open the Connect app or website, and look at everything in Strava. I’m pretty sure I know of lot of runners who do just that.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but my training gains always came from improving my diet, managing my overuse injuries, running hard workouts in a competitive group, and following a proper training plan.
Although there are apps and sites that can help you with some of those things, I don’t think it’s impossible to train properly without using TrainingPeaks (for example).
Interesting… But yes, I feel that GC’s website and route maker are much more polished and user friendly when compared to Strava’s. Garmin’s maps are much better than the ones that Strava uses. Garmin’s course creator tools are much easier to use and have more options when compared to the tools that Strava has. I tried to use Strava’s webpage to automatically create courses of certain distances. The routes that Strava created were also a disaster. If you are able to get it to work for you, then great. It didn’t give me good results.
Another thing about your comment- I am missing out on connecting with people with an Apple watch. I’m totally fine with that because EVERY person I followed with an Apple Watch had bogus activities. Some examples of their bogus activities were “pickleball” while driving down the road, two activities at the same time, and even “swimming” while on a plane. I don’t know what’s up with those watches, but my Strava feed was full of trash from AW users. I don’t miss that in any way.
Good to hear to Garmin’s route creator works better for you. I don’t auto-generate routes; I always create them manually. So I’m not in a position to evaluate Garmin vs Strava with respect to auto generated routes.
From my POV, polished means aesthetically pleasing and relatively free from bugs, with great attention to detail. That’s not the experience I’ve ever had with anything from Garmin, although I realize others may have different experiences.
On the contrary, I use Garmin stuff in *spite* of the bugs and lack of polish. I don’t think Apple is perfect, but at least it can be said that they’ll refuse to add features until they can get the user experience right. Contrast with Garmin, which often adds features in spite of a poor user experience (imo).
Case in point:
– Apple Watch doesn’t play music from its speaker, supposedly because Apple doesn’t think it would be a good user experience (the speaker isn’t powerful enough).
– Garmin’s Fenix 8 forums are full of complaints that the speaker is useless for voice calls and the voice assistant, bc it’s too weak
(Yes I know it’s not a direct comparison, especially since Apple Watch does allow voice calls through the speaker.)
Even DCR has a video where he demonstrates recording a voice note on his Fenix 8; when he plays it back, the volume is apparently so low that he has to put his ear directly next to watch to hear the audio.
And from personal experience, the new audio notes feature for workouts sounded great, until I tried it in practice: the volume was so low when played back through earbuds that the feature was useless. (My earbud volume was set at a level where music and Garmin audio alerts were clearly audible.)
“From my POV, polished means aesthetically pleasing and relatively free from bugs, with great attention to detail.”
Yep, I would agree with that. That’s exactly why I said what I said. Garmin just works. Strava AND Apple have both caused me nothing but problems.
I also manually create routes with Garmin. They are much easier to create with Garmin’s website. Strava’s website is just… clunky (the opposite of polished). My routes often disappeared in the middle of creation with Strava’s system. Multiple times while trying to create a route manually, Strava would add a point at some random location that I was trying to avoid (one again, NOT polished).
We’ll just have to agree to disagree.
> Garmin just works
Maybe for your specific case of creating routes, but I can’t agree with that in general. I could point to a million bugs and issues with poor design over the year, as well as new bugs which are constantly popping up.
Imo people who don’t think Garmin has an issue with software either use very little of the functionality (most people), or are used to stuff that doesn’t work well (also most people imo). When something doesn’t work well, Garmin users tend either not bother to use that function or they find a workaround.
Garmin has had a very long rep of being good at hardware, but not so good at software. And again, I know many runners who use a Garmin, but almost never open Connect. Says a lot that people refuse to use the software which “comes” with the device in favour of 3rd party apps, especially since Connect is supposed to do everything for Garmin devices (unlike say, Apple’s Workouts app, which afaict, isn’t supposed to be everything for every user, as 3rd party apps are supposed to fill the gaps).
> My routes often disappeared in the middle of creation with Strava’s system. Multiple times while trying to create a route manually, Strava would add a point at some random location that I was trying to avoid (one again, NOT polished).
If that’s your experience, I can’t argue with that.
Again, I’ll say that when I do something as simple as deleting the final waypoint in a route in the Connect app, the route is either recalculated in a nonsensical way (so the length almost doubles) or the recalculation just spins forever. When I delete the final waypoint in Strava, the route just gets shorter, which is exactly what I expect.
If route editing doesn’t work in the Connect app, they should just remove the feature instead of leaving it in a broken state.
It’s also baffling that the route creator in the Connect app would show a list of waypoints (although editing them does not work properly), but the route creator Connect website does not.
And again, I pointed to functionality that the Strava route creator has which the Connect website does not:
– waypoints as a list, so they can be easily viewed, and reordered. Can’t reorder waypoints in Connect
– ability to specify an address for a waypoint
– ability to easily retrace your steps or traverse a loop multiple times, for a limited section of the course. This isn’t really convenient in Connect, because again, clicking on the existing track only ever adds a waypoint, it never extends the course to that point. Ofc there are workarounds for this, which again proves my point that Garmin users are complacent when it comes to stuff like this: “X is broken, no problem, there’s a workaround!” Or “X is broken, but no worries, I don’t need X!”
Honestly I would even rather use a free 3rd party site like onthegomap.com over the Connect route creator.
“It says that 3rd party apps may not use artificial intelligence processing in any way,”
Does it? I read it as Strava not allowing 3rd parties to use Strava data to -train- AI models, but an AI model trained by data that isn’t provided by the Strava API can still be used.
Per the e-mail, it’s clear they mean both training and non-training, saying:
“Our previous terms already prohibited the use of Strava data in large language models and other AI applications but we have made those restrictions more explicit in light of the growing activity in this space.”
(Note: Their previous terms actually didn’t prohibit that either, as it never included the terms AI, artificial intelligence, or large language models.)
But… not for analytics…
Just cancelled my subscription too. It seems that’s the only option to express dissent if we’re banned from posting on this topic in community forums.
It would be fun if Garmin added the same AI/data processing clauses for “Garmin’s” data that is pushed to Strava. How many premium subscribers will be forced to cancel?
I am build an alternative, that will easily allow apps to just change the urls and everything will work as usual, data will go from through device to third party apps, as if it had gone through strava.
link to activityconduit.com
If you add options to randomize location, heart rate, speeds etc before reuploding to Strava I’m in.
I disagree that that is what they are saying — I was thinking what Onno said: Strava seems to say that data can’t be used to *train* models.
I’m sure the default for most AI/LLM processing in this area is to ingest the data, but AI can be used for analyzing data without ingesting that data for training and ongoing learning, but that seems to be Strava’s point.
I don’t read the follow up email as you do; they are saying (in my read) that because they can’t rely on third party devs to use the data responsibly (from their perspective), their default is to “prohibit the use of data extracted from Strava users [for training AI models]. If you think their messages are not written well, I’m 100% with you.
“We believe in the potential of AI to transform the athlete experience–whether it’s delivering more personalized insights to help you reach your goals, generating route or training recommendations, or countless other possibilities. But innovation in this space must be handled responsibly and with a firm focus on user control. As part of our generative AI features, we are committed to implementing thoughtful solutions that prioritize user control and the ability to opt out.
“Third-party developers may not take such a deliberate approach to training AI models and as a result, we believe the best decision for the platform and for users is to prohibit the use of data extracted from Strava users in this manner. Our previous terms already disallowed the use of Strava user data in model training and development but we’ve made this more explicit in light of the increasing activity in this space.”
Maybe this is in answer to a recent flurry of articles about the so-called “Strava leaks” (already reported on a few years ago) where stupid military personnel, head of state bodyguards etc were posting public, geo-localised activities on Strava, revealing confidential locations.
Probably they’re just trying to prevent AI companies to scrape their data for free and have a “plan” to monetize the data themselves.
But for sure, between the debacle of their recent routing “upgrade” and this, they really aren’t making a lot of friends.
You can do that by logging into strava and mine all the data you want.
Preventing AI companies from scrapping their data for free – This is actually what Strava are doing with Garmin (and others) data to sell their premium subscription. The hypocrisy by Strava is unreal hey.
Well, I for one, will break my garmin connection to Strava. Thanks for all the fun strava.
If you can’t even process and use machine learning on your own data coming back from Strava, I’m not sure if that would even be legal in the EU?
For a company with a business model that’s 100% dependent on Garmin and Apple sending them data from their customers devices, Strava is pretty hostile towards everyone needing data from them. At some point that might backfire in pretty spectacular fashion.
Be really interesting if Garmin and apple did just this and stopped Strava using data received from 3rd party devices.
Exactly what I was thinking. And Garmin could open up their system to non-Garmin users, for a small fee.
Exactly this. Aside from their own phone app Strava’s existence relies on data they sponge from device mfrs, partners, etc. Imagine if that were suddenly turned off…
I guess there’ll be no more partner/sponsor programs for LeCol and the rest…
“Do not discuss the community things you don’t like in the community.”
And this ^^^ is batcrap crazy 🤦♂️ Combined with the rest it’s remarkably isolationist and authoritarian…, seems to be trending lately…
BTW I never got this email from them (paid subscriber).
Garmin would never do this – that would annoy so many of their customers that rely on Strava and they would definitely lose sales to other device manufacturers that still supported Strava.
If Garmin were to reverse course and suddenly allow other apps to push their data to Garmin, this could be their chance to have Connect make a move on Strava.
It is… like the way Strava behaves… (Relive, IronMan Virtual, etc…)
the competitive advantage of strava is having so many apps built on top. with these changes they are killing most of them. that’s crazy. For all the affected companies,
for all the apps that need to transition, we are happy to help with Terra API
“the competitive advantage of strava is having so many apps built on top.”
What’s the competitive advantage there? Strava’s “data hub” functionality doesn’t require a subscription.
People use Strava due to the mass user effect. If you lose users, Strava loses relevance. Be it from a social platform standpoint (who’s who), from a routing standpoint (heatmap/etc data becomes less useful), or from a Segments standpoint (nobody is there that matters).
Strava fundamentally needs both free and paid users, no matter how much they try and tell themselves otherwise.
I’m seeing still seeing segments, PRs, data, etc. on people I follow, using Garmin, Zwift, et al. – does this mean this hasn’t gone into effect yet or … have the third-parties complied in some manner?
Hi Ray
100%, it is a social database. Now trying to accelerate and secure its AI features. These features are provided by others as well, but not the social aspect. Poor execution of strategy, if there is one.
Strava still happily lets these apps put data INTO the Strava platform (and then considers this Strava property).
The problem with the announced changes is taking the data OUT of Strava and doing anything useful with it.
30days deadline for the apps
Wow, what a cluster. I’m on Wear OS, using the SportWerks app, and have all my workouts shipped to Training Peaks, where I’ve had things for over 15 years. Just for fun, since SportWerks allows me to, I’ve also had those workouts shipped to Strava as well for the last two years. I’ve often wondered how a company with the money, size, and might of Strava can put out an app (the Wear OS Strava app) that is so incredibly lame that it’s not even worth the “free” that it costs. After reading this, I now realize why, and that there’s a lot about this company that I don’t want to be around.
I’m about to switch to SportWerks. How seamless is the TP integration? (I’d be using Intervals.ICU but…)
Absolutely no issue at all. Best of all, the workout is shipped as soon as you tap the “keep” button on your watch at the end of the workout. I usually get the ding on my watch before my HR has come down 20 bpm! I can see everything that is of value to me on a second-by-second basis (HR, GPS location, stride rate) and my “laps” in SW I have set at 1/4 miles so I also see my split times. Again, not to beat a dead horse, but how can a solo dev, working in his spare time, put out an app so powerful and flexible, and Strava puts out a POS that my old TomTom watch (circa 2015) was better than?
Sounds good and sounds like the only thing I need to really dive into is getting data from Wear OS to Stryd Powercenter.
Thanks!
No worries. I’ve done a boatload of testing for this dev (entirely unreimbursed) simply because I want the best available app for our Wear OS devices and the pickings are so slim! Let me know if you have further questions.
I forgot to mention: SportWerks also integrates directly to intervals!
Strava seems like they’re hellbent on being the Dallas Cowboys of social networks. Flashy, lots of fun things to look at, but getting worse and worse at the core product offering.
This is a brave move from STRAVA ….
apart from collecting my data I do very little on there … I borrow other people’s routes / rides.
All my analytics is done either by my coach or by me using veloviewer.com
I view the annual subscription of 75€ as a payment to use Veloviewer (plus 10£ for Ben), not to use STRAVA.
If I can’t get what I get currently from Veloviewer because of their change it will be bye from me …
It’s unfortunate that they didn’t respond to you. I wonder if we’re over-reading the terms of ‘can’t do any analysis’ as an individual. The terms indicate that you can’t show any data to anyone other than the user…I feel like the *intent* of the analysis statement was to not do any additional analytics, etc. and show to others, etc. Basically it feels like VeloViewer is still in the realm of acceptable (sans end of year stuff). As I’m only looking at my data.
That said, the API provides convenience, but just as easy for someone like VeloViewer, others to basically say “manually export your data like this…then use our upload feature” and boom, they are NOT using any API agreement :-)
I agree it feels like intent vs what’s written is disconnected here. But that’s a section they revamped from previous, to make it more restrictive.
And again, as you noted, they had the opportunity to clarify, and chose not to.
The API agreement is also not that clear. See those 2 bullet points out of the agreement:
– Strava Data provided by a specific user can only be displayed or disclosed in your Developer Application to that user. Strava Data related to other users, even if such data is publicly viewable on the Strava Platform, may not be displayed or disclosed.
– You must always respect Strava users and comply with their privacy choices. This includes not sharing a Strava user’s data with other users, end users of your application, or third parties without explicit consent
Goodbye Strava – I have been a premium user for years on end and I will not review my subscription based on this.
I love Strava, as do so many of my friends, training partners and club members. It’s a great place to connect and chat, and spy on how much faster than me they are! I understand they have to make Premium worth it and that means stopping third parties copy features but they are now stifling innovation. Killing Veloviewer will not go down well with a whole bunch of people including the pro cycling teams!
It strikes me as childish behaviour and and a blatant attempt to trap users into their system with no other opportunity to analyse metrics. I wouldn’t mind so much if they offered better analytical tools but they don’t. Veloviewer is great for getting nerdy and it genuinely helps me understand my performance when I’m being super critical about training efforts and races. Strava’s metrics don’t allow that.
I have Garmin devices so I guess Veloviewer could adapt to use that data instead but this just makes everything harder or even impossible for others.
We are a community of athletes who want to be fit and healthy – Strava doesn’t own that and this will backfire badly. U-turn within a week I reckon.
Do you remember when they killed Relive?
Every few years Strava does something similar
For those that don’t remember: link to dcrainmaker.com
And even further back: link to dcrainmaker.com
Im a paying user of Relive, Garmin integrations rules ;-D
Hope either Statshunter or Veloviewer integrates Garmin direct, I will gladly pay for it.
They also bought and then killed Fatmap. Away from cycling it was an incredibly useful route planning tool for many activities. It was extensively used for winter mountaineering as one of the overlays calculated avalanche risk based on depth of snow, angle of slope and wind direction. All Strava have done is kill the original app and incorporate its 3D mapping in its incredibly dull flybys that are not a patch on the Relive ones.
I loved Fatmap, used it a lot for winter maps and other stuff. They just bought it and killed it…. It’s becoming a shit place to be this Strava….
Agree, the end of Fatmap was a huge blow. In fact, Fatmap was what got me into Strava Premium subscription in the first place.
Killing Fatmap put me on the verge of canceling my Premium subscription at the end of this year. And these new API terms, even if not (immediately) implemented to the full extent, has pushed me over the Edge.
I wonder if Ray will now lose his Strava account, given he had critical comments about these changes to the user community… 🤔
Oh Noo ! Ray ! I hope you don’t lose your account before the annual Getting the Christmas Tree Home via Bike post
Thankfully said removal only applies to the Strava Community Hub, their forums.
Let me translate that for you…
“We don’t want you criticise our product on the community hub – or bosses or investors might see and get upset if they think we’re screwing up the business”
Strava was literally made off the back of data sharing APIs from Garmin, Polar etc. If these didn’t exist, Strava wouldn’t be where it is now. Also Strava has thrived from 3rd party devs enriching the experience. Now they think they’re big enough, they’ll kill it off.
Pretty much that. I actually started on Strava because I had an early WearOS watch and Strava was one of the few on-watch GPS activity tracking apps at the time (Endomondo was the other one). But clearly the vast majority of activities on Strava come from other devices/platforms.
So their logic appears to be: You can import your data into our platform but you cannot have another app/platform take it out via the API for any meaningful use.
That might be ok for free accounts but is not acceptable to me as a Premium subscriber.
What a weird move.
They should embrace the position they are in. Instead only make themselves the data hub for subscribers. So if you are a Strava subscriber the apps linking to it, with your permission, will get the data. Then they can make more money, instead of less as now I’m considering terminating my subscription.
I agree.
Strava has become THE data hub. It’s understandable that they do not want that cost w/o a reward. I think “data hub” services should be free to subscribers or available at a nominal cost as a standalone product.
Likely other apps that might be able to act as hubs so Strava isn’t the only one and we can pick and choose. For example, huopt.com has an interesting high level overview of all of my activities.
to be honest I don’t use strava a lot.
I had the subscription as a way to support them because they were doing a good job and to make some routs a couple of times a year.
I cancelled it so it will not renew in July. I hope they change their mind and apologize their users.
Is there a market for an agnostic “fitness data exchange”? No social, no analytics, just one spot that has all the integrations to all the fitness data sources and all the data consumers (including Strava). Wouldn’t compete with any of them, just a clearinghouse. Built on the concept of “you control your data”. Maybe set up as a non-profit joint venture funded by the ecosystem players?
Otherwise we just end up with a giant spaghetti web of one-off integrations between data providers and consumers.
I mean on iOS I would argue run gap is the closest thing with that app. It has a huge selection of other apps you can send your data too. In a round about way, Apple Health does this as well pulling in all the information but it’s difficult to know what’s in there. I have workouts all the way back to 2015 in Apple health pulled from other data sources and stored in there. Other apps to run need to read Apple health which right now doesn’t seem to have wide spread use at least with my apps.
It ends up being a political/competitive issue more than a technical one, as there are plenty of apps that can do some data integration. RunGap has the right messaging, but since they also offer some analytics/visualization, other apps that do the same might not want to participate. Same issue with Apple Health.
You’d almost need a branding where every data provider and consumer is “COOLNAME-compatible”, and the “COOLNAME” data exchange almost happens behind the scenes. You record a workout, it’s automatically loaded into the exchange, and you as a user can decide who it gets sent to. Maybe even the Garmins, Zwifts, etc would expose that data-rights-sharing directly in their own apps, but all control would be by an independent entity that ensures your data sharing preferences are followed.
It would be extremely expensive to run while extremely hard to monetize. A better solution would be for platforms like Garmin to have their own API so you can use third party plugins to export your data to whereever you want.
It doesn’t have to be expensive if you’re just a data clearinghouse. Storage is the highest cost. You could set it up like many of the open source foundations, where the major industry players pay to run the foundation but the governance is independent. It saves them having to maintain a web of one-off API integrations. It’s a win-win for the industry if they could look past their noses.
We’re seeing some companies try this, tryterra.co being one – though, I’m a bit skeptical there. For one, the pricing is kinda crazy for smaller companies (and barely functional for bigger ones). And two, I’ve talked to at least one company that’s listed as being compatible, but has zero knowledge of how they’re on the list, and certainly isn’t using an official API of that company.
Nice find! Try Terra definitely has the kind of functionality that you’d want in a fitness data clearinghouse. As you pointed out, the issue might be in being a venture-backed for-profit company… your “partners” might be reluctant to connect to you due to costs or competition, and your investors will push you to “monetize” the data more, taking you away from a mission of responsibly managing users’ data. The industry as a whole has to want to invest in an independent agnostic entity to broker fitness data. We can all dream…
The data exchange idea can just be a pure subscription model. Other apps and you can push data in, and push / pull data out. With some privacy settings on the data that can pulled out by each app. No complex analytics or visualisations.
There was something similar called EDI (electronic data exchange) back in the late 1980s. It’s a basic publish / subscription model that’s well understood.
Create a stable versioned API, employ industry best practice security and privacy controls and away you go.
Yes, the EDI analogy is a great one! Some pub/sub with encrypted storage. Technically not too hard… getting everyone onboard is tricky part.
Huh. Well I guess it’s their data, and they can decide how much to make it extensible, or not – they’ll have to live with the consequences though. I wonder if 12 months from now we’ll be looking back and saying, ‘man that was a dumb decision they made to kill off their overall API ecosystem’.
I’m guessing their management felt like too many other players were just existing solely off the Strava data and wanted to put an end to that model. Unfortunately, that’s a short-sighted move and it mean the beginning of the end for Strava. Time will tell….
“Well I guess it’s their data”
Yeah, as in not the user’s data. Who apparently cannot in any way authorize an API client to analyze that data, or show it to someone else. Reducing apps to brainless third party client app. And what if the user’s mother happens to get a look at that third party client, or the user’s grandchild? Has the maker of the app broken the API agreement?
And no, “that’s not how it’s meant” does not matter. What matters is what it actually means, and if that’s not what they intended, tough luck for them.
Is it their data ? when you upload a photo to Apple or Google storage does that photo belong to Apple or Google ? the data belongs to you, yes they are the gate keepers of the data, and they need to keep it safe, but not allow you, to send your data to another platform for analysis is simply not correct
Is it their, ie Strava’s, data?
You created it, you uploaded it… you own it under EU GDPR as I understand GDPR. They are solely a Data Processor and / or Custodian.
They need to insure it is protected, not stolen, sold or inappropriately used, but they cannot prevent you from giving someone else access to it OR processing rights over it, NOR can the prevent you removing it, interrogating it, requesting its removal, deletion or correction.
I’m not a GDPR lawyer, but I do work in a dara environment and this feels like an overstep from Strava…
You will still be able to do whatever you want with your data, you just have to manually export the fit file and upload it wherever else. Strava probably thinks that many people will be too lazy to consistently do that, and that’s probably true. It’s the automatic pull through the API that’s being closed. Personally I wouldn’t be objecting if they made API pulls to 3rd party apps a paid-only feature but closing it basically entirely is very wrong.
Storage has different TOS than social platforms. Facebook has usage rights to anything you post (mainly for their algorithms to feed it to other people if you have a public profile). Strava probably has similar language.
“Strava benefits because they’ve become the defecto platform of choice for consumers…”
I vote me make “defecto” the new way to describe something that everyone uses because it’s the only option, but it’s a crappy option.
I noticed the exact same typo. I was also going to point this out, but I fully expected Ray to reply with, “I said what I said.” LOL
Do you think anyone like TrainingPeaks or other could jump in that space and build itself as a data inbound/outbound hub replicating Strava API stuff and find ways to profit from that?
I’m a cheap bastard, but I’d gladly pay $2/mo for “data hub” services. Much more than that and it starts to influence my decisions WRT what watch I buy.
Yep some hub platform needs to exist that does nothing but route workout files in and out.
Intervals.icu has an open API and plans to integrate with as many platforms as possible. Certainly matching Strava’s penetration is a long way off. But the goal is to make Intervals.icu the best data and analytics hub for athletes, coaches and sports scientists. And that means keeping it open.
Lots of potential data hubs out there already (TrainingPeaks, Intervals.ICU, whatever the Apple platform is called, etc.). The issue is that most apps are solely built on the Strava API and would need to create connections to these other platforms – most of which are much smaller scale than Strava, might or might not have proper APIs, etc.
Strava has thrived because of the easy import of workout data from other platforms, the social aspect, and (for select users) certain functions (segments/routes, heatmaps, etc.) – and because missing functionality could relatively easily be offered by third party developers.
Will be interesting to see how the Strava user base reacts to the removal of the last point.
This is what Rungap does, it basically connects to everything and you can control where your data goes. However, it could be shut off by any of the APIs it connects to such as Garmin.
If I could use intervals to track my historical segments (I don’t care about other people’s segments, but, for a ride (or virtual race), I like to compare how I did today compared to how I have done in the past and look at what I can expect to do on a certain effort based on what I’ve done in the past), I’d skip out of Strava tomorrow and never look back.
If Garmin would accept outside data, I’d probably say close to the same thing about it (it won’t take TPVirtual data though).
Same with Training Peaks, though I’d have to learn to use Connect or Training Peaks more than I do now.
I’ve never been one for the social aspects of Strava. I used to use the heat maps to help plan routes, but I haven’t done a long or training ride on the road since getting hit by a car on a training ride 3 years ago.
We have reached out with a lengthly email to Strava for clarification and confirmation that these changes do not impact RunGap. They have replied that RunGap has not been identified as being in violation with their updated API Agreement and no action is required.
Great summary of a huge issue.
Nitpick:
“ow Strava seems to want to own the the “AI space” with it’s always-helpful AI insights that simply re-word my activity titles and tell me something vaguely positive but usually wrong.”
“it’s” = “it is”. You mean the possessive “its”.
“You may not process or disclose Strava Data… for the purposes of… products or services improvements.” – I *love* this part, it is ingenious!
I just canceled my Strava subscription and recommend everyone to do the same.
If a rising tide raises all ships, seems like they pulled the drain plug, or are at least letting the tide out for a while. Any thoughts on how many users this will affect ? Would need some data that they will probably not disclose, but you could do a survey of users that might be accurate if you get a bit enough n (unless that data is restricted/limited by this too, haha). Just curious about how many users they’ll lose over this. My sense is not enough to make a dent in their revenues.
btw did you get a break on the annual subscription rate since the move, or are you still registered in the overpriced US market ?
link to dcrainmaker.com
So basically Strava claims ownership of any data that a user uploads to Strava from elsewhere – e.g. a Garmin recording – , to the extent that they will actively prohibit any further processing of any data where Strava has functioned as an inbetween hub? And this would this include basic calculations like training load? That sounds.. extremely limiting. To the point that Strava loses its raison d’être.
Cancelled my subscription. Time to get off the platform completely. I guess the super(ficial) “dark” mode feature was them adopting even darker patterns.
I guess the only thing we can do is cancel our subs and hope the hit to the bottom line makes a difference.
About time that users just leave Strava. Garmin connect does the same. If it wasn’t for checking on friends routes…, which I recreate manually anyway not using strava.
This is like kidnapping, no thanks
Farewell Strava
Strava only gets my data because it links to my Garmin. Does Strava expect others like Garmin to do nothing about this?
It’s interesting too see that while we’ve see so many Sports Apps being launched since the Zwift boom, to try and get some market share, we still haven’t seen one App trying to compete with Strava.
All it would really take would be an App with a better segment management system, maybe done via AI, which is all people really care about on Strava. The social media part of posting rides is easy…
What is Wahoo or even Garmin waiting??
Garmin tried, its all there:
-Garmin Segments
-Livetracking (Strava Beacon)
-Friends
-Groups
-Feed
-Pictures to activities
-Gamification (Challenges, Badges, Leaderboards)
But do you use it?
Sometimes I attach a pic to an activity in Connect, but for me and not my 3 connections.
But the problem was it was limited to Garmin watches. So not everyone you knew would be there if they have another brand. I think that was short sighted on their part–sync your apple watch to Garmin Connect and maybe you buy a Garmin when it dies.
I post pictures to my activities when it’s relevant (beautiful scenery, for example). I love chasing badges and challenges Garmin provides. I don’t care about segments – neither on Strava nor anywhere else. I don’t have anybody to send LiveTracking links to. And I don’t have a lot of people who would be interested in adding me back on Garmin and, coincidentally, I don’t care. It’s my training log, I don’t want it to become another social network.
Yes, but too many people use Strava so Garmin, whom I think came to the party too late, so Gamin’s version just seems to wallow there. This article has made me think ‘what do I use Strava for?’ answer, not much. I use Garmin for analysis and route making.
I went to the “Apps” section at my Strava profile an found this (translated from spanish):
“… There’s an app for every kind of person. Among such a wide variety, some allow you to analyze unique performance data or find a nearby friend who runs at the same pace as you…”
Maybe they should stop claiming something they don’t allow apps to do…
Seems sketchy for Strava to claim ownership over data that originated from me, and to place constraints on how I choose to use it, even though it comes via their platform.
100% correct
Why should Strava have to send your data to another app? If you want to use that app, upload your data there.
@Duncan That might be acceptable for free users of Strava. The removal of that existing feature is not acceptable to me as a Premium subscriber – hence Premium subscription canceled.
Strava wouldn’t survive 6 months if that same limitation was imposed on them. What if Garmin said to Strava: Nah, you can’t do any analytics whatsoever on the data obtained through our devices and we give you no direct way to get this data. Users will have to manually upload their fit files to Strava if they want that.
Read David’s reply for your answer, almost all of Stravas source data cones from 3rd parties, if Garmin, Wahoo and Hammerhead did tte same Strava would be dead, they couldn’t process segments or anything else, it is utterly buzzard
Strava is just copying Reddit’s API playbook – to kill of any external API app integrations and to fully control their business’s data for AI. Reddit had a massive backlash but it worked for them eventually, I’m sure Strava expects the same.
Very different use case and Strava doesn’t restricts AI processing, it disallows *ALL* Strava data usage – basically, you can push data to Strava but can’t pull from it anymore.
I agree it doesn’t make sense, especially as Strava is really just a downstream app too. But I bet this was the MBA style thinking here. Probably looked genius in the boardroom PowerPoint. :)
100% this is the play, anything else is convenient coincidence.
6 months from now Strava will announce a program to allow AI companies to purchase “their” data for AI model training.
Problem is that most of Strava’s data comes from other companies (Garmin) APIs. Hardly anyone uses their app to record/create data.
I still remember Relive, we cannot even post links, and now even use 3rd party apps… Canceled my subscription for now. Strava reminds me of old Twitter lock-in and API changes, it went only downhill.
I just cancelled my Strava. If they want to play it this way, I’ll just stop using it. I can sync my stuff from Garmin to Intervals. I don’t need Strava. The leaderboards were fun, and the route building was quite good, but I can manage.
Strava must understand that they are using OUR data, and if I want to share MY data with someone else, that’s my choice, not theirs. I guess this is gonna cost them users.
Couldn’t stomach all the changes… finally switched off the auto-renew. They got my annual fee. In July I’ll find another platform, like Hybrid. There has to be a better option than Strava at this point. The last AI push, segment scrub and hazardous trail roundup killed it for me.
It’s actually pretty amazing how poorly Strava is managed. How do they repeatedly make ridiculous decisions like this?
What is the definition of Strava Data ? the fit file I upload is not Stravas it is mine, all Strava do is store it, process it and use it to derive their own data. I can understand if they do not wish anybody to use their heatmaps or any other analytics they calculate, but to gate fence my data is not acceptable.
I’ve been a strava subscriber since day one they introduce a fee, I believe in supporting and paying for the services I use, this money goes towards providing a better service, when they effectively use my money to reduce my service, they force me to question my subscription.
It is due to review in 3 weeks, I’ve already cancelled it. Strava has committed suicide here, I also work in the software business, if a partner dumped this on me with 30 days notice I would instruct my team to not comply, but to remove integration.
Strava have forgotten something important, almost all of their content (certainly cycling) is provided by 3rd parties, only people who use their so-so App generate the content directly, they never truly own the data, very very sad.
The thing that always bothers me about these sort of changes with Strava is that their entire existence is dependent on Garmin, Polar etc. being an open ecosystem. I think it would be nice if Garmin et al would change their terms so that data used from their API must remain open.
I was one of the first 10K users of strava and early on encouraged others to join. Now I encourage people to not pay because it’s a company that is ridiculously tone deaf to its users.
strava seem to have really lost the plot. i guess they’re trying to find a way to make a profit out of the service they provide which is fair enough but in doing so they are destroying that service. its not as if strava themselves provide any meaningful data analysis, their value is in segments and social media.
anyway, i don’t see that it is “strava data” mine is actually garmin data which then feeds into strava so i await garmin’s reply in kind to strava. other people’s data may be from other platforms. some will actually be recording direct in strava in which case i guess it is strava data but strava are fortunate to have data fed to them from other platforms so should be open to feeding it on.
on a side note, the popup ads at the bottom-centre of the page keep stealing focus from the comment entry box. would be great if that could be avoided while maintaining your income
Just become a subscriber
What a dick move. I not only cancelled my subscription, I also sent them a support email requesting refund for the ‘unused portion’ (renewed in September) of my annual subscription fee, as it’s pointless without 3rd party integrations.
Strava just refunded my annual payment (which had been renewed early September)
I had been a Strava subscriber for over eight years, and just cancelled a few days ago because sites like Intervals.icu and VeloViewer have done a much better job implementing Strava’s “premium” features. I realized I’m not really paying for anything of value with Strava compared to the free version. This is probably part of why they are making the API change – if you can’t beat them, cut them off at the kneecaps, right?
Thanks for the heads up.
Tried to cancel my subscription on the website, it isn’t possible.
It only loads a blank page. Only way is to write an email according to that Chatbot supportthing.
We should all fill a complaint wich European Customer Protection, cancellation has always to be as easy as subscription.
stumbled over the same thing: It’s actually not “change membership” but “cancel membership”, the button you’re searching for. This will keep up the premium features for the time of your subscription and then fall back to the free tier. “Membership” means “Paid Membership” in Strava terminology.
That’s so crazy, and sound like it will kill off two of the main apps I use – wandrer.earth (has leaader boards and processes data) and activity fix (processes data to update information on the stava activity). And these are both so key to what I like to do, keeping me motivated and improving post activity workflow.
sigh!
As a recreational rider, I’m tossing Strava into the same bit-bucket as my deleted Twitte… er…X account. They are free to leverage that as best they can.
Well.. looks like we know what the q&a session this Saturday is gonna be focused on hahah
Without Garmin, Strava would probably never have existed. It certainly wouldn’t have reached the level of ubiquity that it has. If Garmin pull their links to Strava, Strava is dead. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t; Garmin’s own Connect app does a better job of performance analysis than Strava does and it would be relatively simple for Garmin to give more access to the app for data from other data providers, such as Apple Health – especially if Apple decided that Strava was no longer worth supporting. Bring Polar and Suunto in and allow users to bring their data into whichever proprietary app they wish and Strava would have nowhere to go but bankruptcy. Maybe that’s what they’re after?
I’ve been a premium subscriber since they first offered subscriptions, but I just canceled.
I’m okay with the demise of any company that takes your data and says, “this is now our data, and you can’t use it anymore.”
I stopped using Strava about a year ago. All I did during my workouts was plan a clever description for Strava. Every workout was a race, and I wouldn’t do things like re-tie a loose shoe or stop at a water fountain because I didn’t want to slow my averages. And then I’d spend leisure time counting kudos. I’m a much happier athlete now that I’m not performing.
Yes, that says much more about me than about Strava. But try a Strava-fast for a few months and see if the workouts don’t get a lot more enjoyable.
Aaaaaaand this kind of stuff is why I pulled the Strava plug this summer
Someone guide me – if I cancel my subscription what’s my best choice for routing road bike, MTB, and trail running? Ideally also syncs to Garmin like Strava does (for now).
RideWithGPS. They have amazing routing, some analytics, and are bootstrapped and profitable. I’ve paid more to RWGPS than I ever did to Strava. Oh! And… if you send them a message asking a question, you’ll get a response within 24 hours (at least that’s been the case for me).
I’m still amazed at how much money Strava has taken on while other apps still manage to do more with less. It’s a Tech-bro Black Hole.
Komoot or Ride With GPS are good options.
RWGPS good for running as well? Trail running routes + heat map is basically why I pay for Strava at this point.
fetcheveryone.com routing options, analysis and a chat forum etc etc etc – free
Well… that’s fair enough. The running will be a challenge since RWGPS focuses on cycling. There has to be a good running option out there already? Since I don’t run, I can’t speak to it, though.
Buying a cheap Garmin watch get’s you free unlimited access to to Garmin Connect, which is where most of Strava’s heatmap data for running comes from.
Just go with Garmin. They have route creation and heat maps for road biking, MTB, and trail running. Many of their watches have course guidance, live segments, round-trip course creator, and popularity routing built in.
Screw this. Canceling my sub – ain’t their data, it’s mine.
My guess is that there’s a TrainerRoad deal and integration announcement incoming and a lot of these changes are driven by TR wanting to build a moat around this data stream
But TR is arguably the one most impacted here short-term?
I’m confused, how is TR building a moat?
TR CEO posting in the TR forum on this topic just now:
“This was crazy news to us, too. We’re still understanding the full implications; but for now:
Good news – We’ve been syncing Garmin Connect for a long while now. When we have both a GC and Strava ride file, we de-dupe them and use the GC .FIT file for processing/training/displaying. This is because Strava edits the data and takes a few things out.
More good news – We were already working on pulling rides from Zwift directly into TrainerRoad.
Even more good news – We had direct pulling from Wahoo on the roadmap, but now that’s obviously moved up to be worked in parallel with the Zwift integration.
For now, I recommend Garmin users make sure they have Garmin Connect synced”.
And this is a great example of what will happen all over the place. Strava have made themselves irrelevant, which (as far as I am aware) is not the most robust business model. In fact, the only people without a route through this might be those who use the Strava app to record their activities direct.
In theory, a deal with TrainerRoad would include exclusive rights to access Strava data, thus excluding alternatives. Not really a “moat” in the business/tech sense though.
Heh, in case you ever wondered what a super annoyed DCR would be like, watch this video.
If I were making a third party app, I wouldn’t even put half a thought into maybe offering a compliant version of my client, just focus on migrating to the hardware makers’ clouds, on preparing users that Strava connection might go away.
Wow, those people *really* don’t understand the market they happen to dominate, apparently out of luck alone.
November fools day?
This seems like the problem with having one main company controlling a space like this. They can pull the rug out at anytime. Will be interesting to see if they shoot themselves in the foot at the same time.
Strava is becoming increasingly worthless
Is Strava contemplating an IPO in the near future? Because this smells like something a company preparing for an IP would do.
Take an action that massively impacts their revenue ? who would consider investing in a company run by people who make decisions like this
I think Garmin, Wahoo, and all the other device makers should adopt a similar policy – no access to “their” data without permission. Then immediately grant permission to other analytics platforms -Trainer Road, Training Peaks, etc. and cut Strava completely out of the picture, so the only data they get is from the Strava phone app. I doubt many of their users (an fewer still paid users) are using their phones as primary fitness devices.
I think if Garmin alone did this, Strava would die, and I doubt it would hurt Garmin at all, and might drive users to their site.
Well said
This will hack off Garmin users more than it’s worth – Garmin would be saying “you can’t upload to Strava automatically”. Garmin/Strava customers will complain . . . and Garmin’s response is – “Well Strava started it”?
Garmin (and other co’s) are pushing data to Strava, whereas Strava is preventing pulling data from it.
As a Wahoo user and TR subscriber, I just learned today that the only way my outdoor rides were getting to TR was through Strava, and that there’s currently no way to bypass this soon-to-be closed portal. I want to extend a big “FU” to Strava for this policy change, with an extra emphasis on the “U” for the short notice and timing.
But I also have to take TR to task a little bit for relying on a company that clearly has ambitions (however misplaced) to become a competing training platform as a conduit for their Wahoo data.
I hoped to get my app finished this year, but now I’m questioning the value. It uses a machine learning model and completes some analysis of your performance.
That they can do this without fear of having their lunch eaten by a competitor just shows what a monopoly Strava has.
Disappointing. I canceled my Strava subscription last week because the watered down heatmap is no longer useful when planning less popular routes (which only accumulate public tracks over more than one season). Luckily, all the apps I use are connected directly to Garmin, and I just severed the link between Garmin and Strava.
I won’t be missing the made up AI insights either.
Strava premium user from the beginning, along with my wife. If these changes are as bad as reported, we’ll cancel our premium accounts and use Garmin Connect. I also use Golden Cheetah, which is ridiculously powerful. Another company destroying their loyal user base.
The thing here it’s not Strava’s data – it’s my data. It’s pretty much the same with their very badly worded terms and conditions about what they can do with *my data* re them doing AI on it. Which basically says anything they want, even if they claim they don’t do that. Already I’ve stopped giving them most of my data because of that; this will just drive more people away.
Veloviewer premium is the only reason I paid for Strava. I just cancelled my Strava membership which was set to renew in 2 weeks.
By the way: I didn’t get the e-mai
Is this announcement for subscribers only?
Neither did I. I will have to relearn how to use GC. Looks like they changed the UI and I cannot find anything. What a PITA.
I believe it was sent to everyone registered in Strava Developer Program.
Well here’s the thing. It’s not Strava data. My activity data is mine, I share it to the Strava platform. Their action means I will cancel my Strava subscription for which I’ve been a long time subscriber!
Madness.
They are going to do the same as reddit. Cut off access to the data and then start selling it
Enough is enough. I just unsubbed, and wrote them the following support ticket, as well:
Hi all,
I’m canceling my Summit subscription after close to a decade. The “before you go…” page said that I ought file a support ticket if something is wrong, and I figured that I owed y’all the courtesy of telling you why in a little more detail. Basically there are two things that have pushed me in the direction of cancellation:
1) This new “AI” thing is deeply offensive in a lot of ways. I ride my bike to stay healthy, and also, as a means of transportation that lowers my carbon footprint. The concept that every single time I ride my bike, some computer performs an enormous amount of work and burns an enormous amount of power (“AI” now uses as much power as a small country!), just to write a sentence that I already knew that often contains falsehoods (the other day, I had a third-best 20k time, apparently; the “AI” told me I set a new personal best?), is absolutely insane. It is unhelpful and contributing to the destruction of our planet. I cannot imagine that the NPS metrics on the “AI”‘s helpfulness are above 0, and it is shocking to me that you have not disabled it by now until you could make it actually provide useful insight, rather than being simply patronizing to people who are paying you money.
2) Strava’s new plan to kill every single app that I use with *my own data* (and the data of my friends that opt in) is unreasonable. TrainerRoad will no longer be able to aggregate my Strava activities and analyze them; the Page Milling and On Orbits leaderboards will have to end; VeloViewer will no longer be able to tell me what percentile of a cyclist I am; my friends and I will no longer be able to go for a Tuesday night group ride and have some friendly competition by adding together segment times with a small app. These are not your data. These are *our* data. It is fundamentally hostile for Strava to tell me that I may not use and analyze my own data anymore.
I would love to keep paying money for a service that I love. I have paid for Strava before it even got me anything useful or different because it brought me joy to see my friends being active. I have stuck with Strava through the VC era of bad decisions. But enough is enough. I’m not going to pay for a service that fundamentally disrespects me. If Strava changes their minds, hey, I’m not up for renewal until May; I’ll pay by then if I can do what I want with my data. But if Strava keeps going down this path I just don’t see why I should be a part of it. I beg of you: it is time to care about your users! I want to love Strava and I am sad that y’all keep doing this kind of thing.
Best regards,
joshua
After getting the email from Strava, I canceled the renewal of my paid subscription, which I’ve had since 2016. Enough is enough.
Now I have to figure out what the alternatives are, especially for 3rd-party platforms like Wandrer and VeloViewer Explorer tiles, as well as route planning.
May I suggest checking out http://www.fetcheveryone.com as an alternative? The owner/developer builds analytic tools, route mapping, as well as user training based games. There’s active forums and blogs, plus training portfolios. See an example of my July cycling infographic.
It’s free to use (supported by donations) and has user voted feature development and implementation. Also Ian is a really nice chap!
That’s like recommending someone goes to a nursery when they can’t get into university. The analytic tools in Fetch are at the best noddy built on a decidedly iffy dataset. And as a solution it completely misses that noone is going to build an api to collect data from Fetch for their third party app which is the main issue Strava has created.
I am most offended by their justification. Doing this to protect user’s privacy. That is pure b****it. It is only done for Strava to earn more money.
I find it legitimate that they do not want to be a free data brokering platform. DCR is arguing “Garmin and others can not handle the scale at which Strava does it”. Fair enough.
In a similar way, many platforms with major content (NY Times, Reddit, …) do not want AI players to use all their data for free to train models. Fair enough.
But please be a management team that communicates honestly and transparently. Simply state that you want to earn an honest buck, no issue with that.
A company lead by a management team that insults its customers by lying to them is doomed.
The policy of Strava is quite interesting, because the data they use to create the heat maps, suggestions, routes, leaderboards is OUR data, not theirs.
I do understand that providing data to others can be somehow risky, but they are not in a position to decide what someone wants to do with its heart rate or power data…
This has given me the impetus to cancel my subscription renewal (although it remains active until it expires). They ask you why you want to cancel so I told them it was this decision. If enough people do it they may get the message
I like Strava but I cancelled my paid membership years ago over a similar move to this when they basically tried to claim ownership of all our data (despite the fact that all of this data comes, necessarily, from 3rd parties). The amount of data that Strava tracks on its website is minute. I’m fine letting Garmin send my workouts to Strava but I am pretty sure I long ago ended any data coming in from Strava to any other platform.
This is making me consider if I want to keep Strava at all. The only thing I “need” it for is getting data out of iFit more easily but I can download direction from iFit if needed. Now that I have Runn on my treadmill…that’s not even necessary anymore. I’m not particularly active on Strava at this point other than looking at other people’s workouts. Which…fine.
After thinking on it more…I went and turned off all of my connections into Strava. There’s literally no value added to me to Strava collecting it and since they seem to want to own my data…I’m good.
I took that a step further. I deleted my account and all the data that went with it, then removed their app from my watch and phones. It was only a secondary storage for me anyway, and I’m sure they won’t care because I’m not a paying customer but I have a feeling that there will be enough people doing this for someone to notice.
@TimmyB The only reason I haven’t done this yet is that I have some friends I follow on there. But not many so I may follow sooner or later. The thrill of a million kudos for a workout is long gone. I cancelled my premium years ago over this behavior so I don’t get any benefit from leader boards.
Most of my friends are on Garmin and my data is there and TrainingPeaks.
Yeah, I don’t have any friends, so… :D
Strava forgetting that this is MY data, not THEIR data.
Strava must be looking at Twitter/X right now thinking “Look at them there’s no way they are going to lose their customer base by ostracizing them” as millions flock to Blue sky…
Veloviewer is the reason I pay my Strava subscription.
I will go where they go.
This is how I interpret Strava’s move here. Building a moat around their key selling point, to most users they offer a social feed of activities (which has a lot of value) all the other metrics/functions Strava offers are kinda meh but the reason most people keep using it is nowhere else brings everyone’s activities together at the scale they do.
The town square for all runners/cyclists/etc and we’ve all seen (X) how quickly that can be destroyed so they are making a very crude attempt to stop another company threatening their position. All the side effects on coaching apps is collateral damage which they think is worth taking.
I think most commenters here are a bit different to the bulk of Strava users, I think the vast majority won’t really notice or understand this annoucement from Strava. I’ve now taken steps to fully disconnect from Strava and use other services, but I was already moving in that direction anyway, the social aspect just doesn’t appeal to me like it used to and my sub ran out this month.
You may be right… but do you think those “social network” users are willing to pay the subscription? How will Strava make money? If they made API a paid feature I could understand it much better….
So what would happen if Garmin does the same thing and says to Strava:
You can no longer use any data from a Garmin device?
Would run Strava out of business almost instantly, no?
Maybe Garmin could step in to help all us athletes who use Garmin devices…..
Just a thought……..
THIS would be beautiful
The sad reality is that had Strava basically shut down offices five years ago (or make it ten even) and handed the existing tech to a minimally staffed maintenance team, I would probably have kept paying my subscription until old age. Few things they have done in recent years haven’t made me doubt that the money is well spent, it’s as if they were aiming for a customer that definitely isn’t me.
I see problem with historical data.
If a company that currently uses Strava API wants to keep their historical Strava data, they can IMHO refuse new Terms&Conditions, stop using Strava API and keep what they have.
On the other hand if they accept (for some reason) new Terms&Conditions, they must delete historical data.
These changes are not uncommon in my world of connecting to apps via APIs to collect and aggregate data. Unfortunately, multiple regulatory bodies across many countries quietly release privacy requirements for anyone using AI, so anything that references AI is entirely understandable and not within Strava’s control. Also, clear definitions of ‘use’, ‘analysis’, ‘insight’ and ‘enriched’ and ‘derived’ data are something we’ve seen. So, reporting how many miles ran last week is not an analysis but an insight. While this change seems disappointing, it aligns with many other data holders who aggregate people’s data. The fine line between collecting data, allowing data collection and regulating data is a harsh new world, which Strava is right in the middle of.
Then the reasonable course of action by Strava would be to a) request its users to provide updated consents to sharing their data with third parties, and/or b) insert additional privacy and data protection obligations on these third party users in the API T&Cs.
The fact that Strava has not done this is indicates that a) they are unaware of where users see the value in Strave (the data hub aspect), b) they are looking to implement some of these features themselves (eventually) and monetize that (e.g., the AI commentary, useless as it maybe right now), and/or c) they are lazy/don’t care.
I suspect it is a combination of all three.
In that case, all device manufacturers that Strava pulls data from will have to restrict Strava as well and prevent them from using the data for AI.
The non-disastrous approach would be to create separate permissions for read (including share) and read (but don’t ever expose anything, not even a link to the Strava activity).
Sure, bad actors could ask for “small read” and use the data as if “big read” had been granted, but those will just as well ignore their agreement with Strava. The thing is, different levels of permission already exist (read, edit) and the same mechanism can also be used for different kinds of data use on what’s technically the exact same API.
Strava could have easily done this, perhaps even downgrading all existing grants and requiring explicit opt in by users. But they chose not to.
I suspect that the ultimate root cause is that Strava, trying to expand its user base beyond the core cyclists, at one point declared more casual users their clear priority (low likelihood of those becoming subscribers be damned, well, it’s their business after all). And this goal then slowly turning into a goal of increasing the *ratio* of casuals to fitness geeks, perhaps through promoting people matching that goal all too well or even through bad success metrics. Some of those hired/promoted for casual fit might even secretly get a little kick out of disappointing those annoying power users who stubbornly refuse to enjoy the synthetic positivity of computer generated praise for uploading the walk to the parking lot.
Strava seems to be working hard to kill of its app entirely. First there is the useless AI that basically gaslights you at every opportunity but in a super annoying fake “YOU DID IT!!” way. Then there was receiving a notification every time a friend uploaded an activity. Now there’s this. I don’t think they have an understand of how their app is actually used and so they’re pitching investors and advertisers on the wrong concept (which seems to be the data is the value). It’s used mainly for runners to do what runners do: compare their times to their friends, see others training and what gear they like (and the same for bikes). It’s basically a giant social media running club in an era when running clubs are booming. Yet, they’re making it harder to find what people go to the app to get: genuine interaction with people you’ve run or ridden with and races against. It’s utterly crazy to me. I’ve been subscribed at $12 a month for two years now. Today, when I couldn’t turn off the notification feature, I thought about cancelling my subscription and even deleting the app.
So for Wahoo, Zwift, Suunto, and other brand users
They can export .gpx file and import it to TrainerRoad or wherever they wish.
But will ordinary user just do that? Or is too much hassle?
So Golden Cheetah will no longer be able to get data from Strava (analysis and aggregating)
Also all the new miles / areas add one like wanderer will stop working (aggregating data)
Ray, I hope all your analysis is from original device files. If you download from Strava you won’t be able to use your analysis tool to compare devices…
Here’s the funny thing: maybe this was really all very innocent and not meant to cause this backlash. It’s now a PR nightmare NO MATTER WHAT THE INTENT WAS! Do you remember when the Pixel Watch first came out and they did such a crap job with the release that 95% of the public believed that you MUST purchase a FB Premium subscription to use the watch? Despite that being hogwash, and that 99% of the “fitness” things most people would do with the watch were free, the ball got dropped and comment after comment was, “No way I’m buying that watch if I have to buy a subscription!”
Strava can backpedal all they want but it’s too late. They’ve engendered an insurmountable amount of distrust. Heads will roll.
As Jane Fonda as Leona Lansing so eloquently said in The Newsroom:
link to youtube.com
Strava has made themselves unrelevant and unuseful.
Enshitification
By definition
This.
Doctorow argues that new platforms offer useful products and services at a loss, as a way to gain new users. Once users are locked in, the platform then offers access to the userbase to suppliers at a loss, and once suppliers are locked-in, the platform shifts surpluses to shareholders. Once the platform is fundamentally focused on the shareholders, and the users and vendors are locked in, the platform no longer has any incentive to maintain quality.
link to en.wikipedia.org
Strava will be out of business within 12 months.
Compute cost isn’t free and we have stricter data protection laws now so the change to the API endpoints makes total sense.
I found this article very one sided, and to be honest, extremely whingy.
J
That may be a valid point of view but I think the comments here show that it isn’t one which a lot of Strava users are going to adopt. It does seem like the poor messaging has caused them to shoot themselves in the foot with their user base/customers here, but time will tell I guess.
That argument would be a lot stronger if the API access was not also being removed for paying Strava Premium subscribers. But it is.
Finally a reasonable comment. Everyone saying you own your data, of course you do, but that doesn’t give you the right to demand Strava provides a service for free to pass this onto other applications. Developing and running the API for downstream services to consume the data is extremely expensive.
What would have been far more sensible is for Strava to only this availalable for paid subscribers, they are obviously struggling to find a way to attract more people to pay for the service and this would be one. Instead they seem to be want to alientate everyone who does pay for other services so are more likley to give them some dollars!
Except the GDPR exactly does that, Colin. It’s my data, I can take it anytime to anywhere I want. Strava has to enable this. They want to do that by having to provide the full archive of activities to me instead of using the API? Fine by me.
I am guessing those API costs and data laws do not apply to the data Strava gets from device manufacturers like Garmin, Coros, Wahoo, etc?
not one word in both communications even remotely points to what you raised; Strava earns money from users data – and that is fine; but they use the cover of data security to play to their agenda – kill other apps that make the whole Strava experience possible. Should privacy be a real concern, they would have added a consent box as required. But all ot works for is for Strava to have all cake for themselves
You can manually export files from Strava and manually upload them somewhere else.That’s not changing.
But to do it after every workout is likely too time consuming for most.
Yeah, none of these arguments hold water.
For example, I didn’t dive into it too much here, because Strava didn’t bother to answer my question about it…but Strava actually has a secondary class within the API called “Community Applications”.
The (Nov 11th) API terms specify that only “community applications” may display other data from users. But not regular applications (as ‘community applications’ support up to 10K users). These manually approved applications seem to be cases for mass event type scenarios (e.g. a grand fondo, a corporate wellness thing, etc…) or such. In those cases, you can display data to 3rd parties. Which of course, completely shatters the entire premise of their privacy argument.
Look, if they want to lean on privacy and grandularity, then cool – simply build in the controls into the API to do that (they’ve done that before, as does Garmin with numerous levers). If they want to lean on this being expensive, cool, make passthrough or whatever only available to premium (but no, it’s not expensive). If they want to lean on protecting from AI somehow, then again, put rules in place, or controls in place, to whatever in place.
Either way, they need to learn how to communicate. I’ve never seen a company repeatedly screw up communication so many times and so many ways. It’s just not that difficult, especially for a company in the Bay Area surrounded by a gazillion PR professionals.
all of you bad mouthing Strava on this forum. I’m reporting you to them. And their legal team, headed by Mitt Grates, will be coming after each and every one of you who does not profess their loyalty to the orange app.
What is it with orange apps?
I feel like it would have been way easier if they had just said “hey, apps, we’re going to start charging a premium licensing fee for any app with over 1,000 API calls / month” or something like that. Let those apps figure out a funding model to support it, strava opens a new revenue stream, and power users are left happy that they can still use their data the way they want. I already gladly pay for intervals.icu, and I’d pay a little more if required to use my data.
Does this also mean that fundraising websites will no longer be allowed to show the training/efforts that you are undertaking in pursuit of a challenge?
If so, that’s an awesomely stupid move.
Unintended consequences.
I just cancelled my July renewal. 10+ years and I’m out.
Wow. Well timed report from my perspective. This would impact how I use Strava, and I had been holding out on my Nov. 20 premium plan renewal tomorrow because…I dunno, this past year of Strava announcements isnt adding value and was waiting to see if something cool would be announced. Except now its the opposite. Thanks for the consumer report Ray. Really appreciate you having your ear to the industry ground.
I use SmashRun which is linked to my Strava account. It summarises and visualises my running data in ways that Strava simply does not, and is a great utility.
SmashRun haven’t made a blog post about this yet, but I’m guessing this screws them over massively?
At least I can link it directly to my Garmin account and cut Strava out of the equation…
It is getting rediculus. Canceled my subscription.
It’s my data, so I should be able to decide what to do with it.
On the AI side, well … go and stuff this AI crap up your A***, Strava. Not everybody sees value in it.
Would love to see this checked on court. Is this even legally possible?
I’m the author/origin of the data. If I allow a third party like TrainerRoad to do analytics with my data no matter where they got my data from and it happens to be Strava that send my data with my consent…how can Strava even restrict something on that data?
This construct that Strava put in their terms and conditions should be illegal from the start because it puts them in front of their user rights.
You are still the owner of the data and completely free to send your data to these third party apps (directly/manually, via other platforms like Garmin, etc.). Strava is just not going to do it for you going forward.
The issue is whether this automatic sharing is a key expected part of the Strava service – I believe it is (at a minimum for Premium subscribers) and that the removal is galactically stupid move. But it is not a data ownership issue (in fact, you can even get all of the Strava has on/from you out of the platform quite easily as an archive).
That’s frustrating and potentially going to break a lot of stuff. Trainerroad should be OK though as long as you use their app for your indoor rides. I guess it will struggle to upload any outdoor rides that come in through Strava.
Are strava really trying to eff this up for everyone. Reeally?
Quote: Activities from Strava will soon only be visible to the athlete that performed the activity, not to their coaches or followers.
So no segment leaderboards? No flyby? No group ride companion rides?
A new-world-order apparently. It’s Strava’s data, but you still own your sore butt and legs.
2nd comment.
I am not sure I was ever asked to opt in (or out) of Strava being allowed to use my data (historic or current) to train Strava’s own AI model. Given that Strava cites privacy issues for their changes to the API terms and conditions I am now concerned that this also means that I should be able to opt in/out in general.
Support request filed.
Talk about trying to lose a customer base. What about charities that offer incentives for donations? Run 100km in a month etc. None of that can be used anymore.
I don’t recall strava creating any data whatsoever. It simply collates YOUR and MY data.
I hereby give permission for MY fitness data which I uploaded to Strava, to be supplied to third party platforms.
You might give/have given permission for your data to be shared. That does not create an obligation for Strava to do so for you, let alone automatically via an API.
They have provided this as part of their service historically and clearly created an expectation that this is part of the Strava offering, but they are of course free to change their service offering.
And we are of course free to vote with our data and our money – I for one certainly will.
This is my entire frustration with Strava: I’m a paying user. I want you to succeed, Strava. But you keep doing stupid shit and it pisses me off. How can I be part of a voice that gets you to think differently?! You’re already awesome and you can continue to be while doing better, not worse.
Hello DC Rainmaker!
Since you are obviously tech-savvy enough to offer us this deep-dive into Strava’s legalese, here in a word is what Strava is doing (like so many others with / before it, e. g. the most egregious Fakebook– uh, I mean Facebook): Enshittification, or Platform Decay [or Platform Decadence, my preferred synonym]: coined by Cory Doctorow; see details here: link to en.m.wikipedia.org
I’ll use your link for my Amazon shopping coming up.
Cancelled
I have a very big problem with Strava doing this, notwithstanding the fact that I don’t use any Strava integrations – all of the data that I want on any given platform, I put there myself. As others have noted, this is _my_ data. Not Strava’s. Strava has a license (explicit or implicit) from me to use my data for the purpose of their service. They do not have the right to restrain me from giving a license to a third-party service to use my data in a similar way, which I am implicitly doing when I link that third-party service to Strava.
If they don’t want data going out, they should shut down the APIs that allow the data to go out. But enough of this nonsense of laying claim to data that isn’t theirs to claim, and placing restrictions on it that contradict the intention of the actual owner of the data.
I cancelled my Strava subscription when they banned links (e.g. YouTube) in posts. Now I see it was the right decision.
The gall of them to tell ‘third party’ apps that they can’t use ‘Stravas data’ to for AI or share with others.
I would wager 95%+ of ‘their’ data is coming from 3rd party integrations. I mean who actually uses their app to record activities?
What if Garmin decided to implement a similar policy? I guess that would be the end of Strava’s usefulness real quick.
I used Strava as a hub for integrations but now I have to re-do all my integrations, and it makes me less tied to Strava and less likely to keep using it.
Some product guy must have deillusions of grandeur that Strava is going to ‘do everything’. What a disaster
This makes me considering renewing my paid membership for the next year. Ugh
Like most people I had all my data uploaded to strava and have any other platform get it from strava. Since strava started to do this kind of behaviour several years ago, I moved to upload my data to garmin and connect everything else to garmin, not strava.
I find it funny that Strava keeps saying “strava data strava data strava data strava data strava data” when in reality it is OUR data, the user’s data, not their data.
Im since 2014 on Strava and never had a premium account. Unneccessary.
I have every data to analyze on Garmin.
Garmin has a good and fully free web platform, and the firstbeat algorithm is probably the best on the market to analyze hrv, respiration, sleep data, training data etc.
The garmin web platform accepts free evenń 3rd party fit files for segment comparisons of course than without the deep analyze tools.
How do you think this will affect functions like strava segments on wahoo devices? They use the segment times to compete against your previous times, as far as I can tell that function is in violation of these new clauses.
Yes – From how Ray has described it, it seems like Wahoo can’t show the K/QOM for a segment, only your own PR.
That’s where selective enforcement comes in. Garmin and Wahoo will be safe, chances are their lawyers know each other from the gold course and so on, but if you are an Asian upstart device maker or something like that all bets are off.
I suspect it is all about AI and the future of online fitness & training, and the rest is just a smoke screen.
As the current AI based offerings of Strava are miserable at best, and it will take them a long time to utilize the wealth of user information they own to bring real value, they simply are doing their best to lock the competition, at the risk of loosing their most valuable assets: partners and (paying) users.
I’ve used Strava for years and years to be the central store of my activities across devices (phone, Garmin, Fitbit, Wear OS and now an Apple Watch).
I’ve not found another app that allows you to be device agnostic and store all your activities from various devices in one place. Does such an app exist because if so I’ll download my Strava data and delete my account
There is a website http://www.fetcheveryone.com
Ten year paid subscriber to Strava and I just cancelled my annual plan with them–and told them the reason why. Frankly I have been using Training Peaks more recently and just kept the Strava game going out of support for the old idea the CEO mentioned, Strava leading the way on fitness and health social media. If its a walled garden (or maybe walled AI farm) I am not excited to pay to go from participant to subject. Now if FORM Swim and Garmin can just work things out…
That’s infuriating as it will kill off a lot of small apps that I appreciate like Wandrer, Squadrats, ProBikeGarage and Veloviewer.
Strava is built upon the same freedom that they now dare to restrict for everyone else: To process the data they received from other sources and even monetize them. I could totally understand them to limit access to their processed data, e.g. Segments, or whatever limited analytics they do. But this is just a blatant attempt to kill off any 3rd party competition, especially the smaller ones.
Does anyone know of an open source effort to standardize API access to fitness data APIs, e.g. Garmin, Wahoo, Zwift, TrainerRoad etc.? The cycling community would benefit greately from such a project. It doesn’t make much sense for every data consumer to implement all these connections on their own. While bigger applications like Intervals, TrainerRoad, TrainingPeaks have the resources to do that, many smaller applications certainly don’t. It just adds so much unneccesary boilerplate to small projects, which is why Strava filled that hole in the first place.
I basically only use Strava for two things: The Heatmaps and getting data easily from Zwift to Intervals. So with this I cancelled, those heatmaps were getting quite expensive. As soon as Intervals gets direct connection to Zwift (which sounds like it should be soon) I will delete my Strava account entirely…
Strava will not just lose subscribers with this change, they will lose the data from nonsubscribers that adds value to the subscriptions. Those of us who have been playing with workout data for many years will remember the mess of shifting your data around using various import apps, until steadily it became pointless as Strava became the hub. I don’t intend to go back to the old days unless I have to, but I can easily just make TrainingPeaks my hub instead, as all of my data already goes there anyway. And if TrainingPeaks is the hub, why would I continue to send my data to Strava for them to monetise?
Anyone knows of any other platform that would produce smooth altitude graphs on the routing path except strava? This is literally the only thing I still use it for.
And what’s the problem??????
Let’s all abandon Strava and wait for the apps to connect to the Garmin, Wahoo, etc. apps…….when Strava is without customers, we’ll see what happens
I don’t use any 3rd party apps but i was paying subscription to support Strava to support the company, not really to use the perks that goes with subscription. As a software engineer I very much dislike their move and I’m no longer willing to support such company. So they won’t see any money from me going forward.
I’ll also try to raise awareness in my social bubble and try convince people to cancel their subscriptions as well. That’s probably the only form of feedback the company will listen to.
The API updates page now has some extra details (dating November 19th, so I guess they’ve seen your rightfully angry video) and it seems like some of the concerns were addressed, but if I were TrainerRoad or any other platform using users’ Strava activities to build training plans for said users – I wouldn’t stop making new direct connections to manufacturers’ (Garmin, Wahoo, Zwift) data hubs.
Yeah, their update seems to entirely sidestep things and use a lot of clever language.
At the end of the day, their update DOESN’T say:
A) Coaches can access data of the user (it says coaching apps can provide feedback)
B) AI tools can be used (it says, even more clearly, they can’t), the pretend line between calling it training versus using is absolutely silly, since they are more clear elsewhere you can’t even use machine learning according to their API
C) That apps can use/show data to others
And I’d argue the whole 0.1% *OF APPS* thing is entirely useless metric when you have tens of thousands of registered apps, of which 95% are likely long-abondoned projects for a handful of users by a hobbyist developer.
*Update here: link to press.strava.com
This is ridiculous! For me, some of the main reasons to use Strava are third party applications like StatsHunters and Wandrer.earth.
Ooh, wandrer.earth! I’m going to really miss that in the summer if it doesn’t work anymore ☹️
And same here, I’m not even a paid user of Strava but the reason I use it is to route data to other apps. I guess I would become a paid user if I could no longer do that, but to wipe it out completely just means I never use Strava
Seems like an opening for Trainingpeaks to jump onto, they’re pretty good at amalgamating data from multiple sources, much better than Strava at analytic tools and with TPV this would be another reason for users to go premium
Whether they would they have a financial heft to exploit this gap tho, I’m not sure
Canceled our family plan as a result of this change. The family plan was one of the only good things Strava has done recently.
Strava would be nothing without the data it collects from our devices. I my case, Garmin Connect is my main training log, Strava is only a mirror of that data. If Strava doesn’t share with third parties, we shouldn’t share with Strava either.
guessing they simply want to sell their own training plans ??
I dont really know how they can keep going when only 3/20 actually pay anything
( from what I can see fellow ‘athletes’ )
Thank you Ray for bringing this to light. Everything has been said, so I have just canceled my premium subscription (was member since 2017).
With the ease of AI tooling, access to this data was going to see competitive products explode – instead of competing here they seem to have decided to shutdown data pipeline. It’s a sad echo to what happened with FatMap. I will re-direct this money to other more open platforms like David’s excellent intervals.icu.
Do you know which connected apps are in the 0.1% that Strava said they have pro-actively contacted which are affected? Is there anything to be learned from the set of apps they contacted or did not contact?
From what I gathered about the apps that I use:
VeloViewer is saying: “We have always had a really strong relationship with Strava, and are currently working our way through these changes with them. We will let you know more when our position is confirmed – this is likely to be in a couple more weeks.”
Wandrer.earth: “I’m speaking with them about this on Wednesday and will report back”.
Statshunters: “StatsHunters was reviewed in the beginning of this year and after some email conversation was approved. I asked the Strava team if they can signoff on the policy. So hope I get a clear answer.”
Squadrats: “We are also not sure what Strava has in mind exactly. We will be talking to a Strava representative on Friday, and will let you know afterwards.”
Thanks for that. So sounds like they did not pro-actively contact those apps, so if Strava is telling the truth then those apps would not be affected….but you have to believe Strava’s pr statement, which I’m not sure I do.
Thank you for the summary!
This is totally puzzling.
– There’s nothing more annoying than companies saying “we’re here to help” and “we are working closely with partners” and then doing the opposite of that. If they don’t want feedback and have made up their mind on the decision couldn’t they have just said that and listed their the true reasons?
– if they wanted to stop freeriding of analytics or coaching apps, couldn’t they simply limit API access to paying users? Or make API partners pay?
– do they have AI Coaching features in their pipeline and are trying to make life difficult for de facto competitors?
– what do they want the API to be used for? Are there any use cases left? They might have just killed the API.
Flipping this around is there any outside force(s) driving Strava to make this move? I am no expert on this type of thing by in Europe things like GDPR have had a massive effect on how user data is processed.
GDPR is mostly about informed user consent.
As long as the user is informed and gives you consent you can handle their data the way users ask you to.
Strava could easily support some of the mentioned edge cases (sharing of private activities, ai training, etc) by tweaking their API rather than prohibiting them completely.
But if Garmin was to argue the same way and change their APi in the same way, then Strava would become useless.
Hi Ray,
Thank you for addressing this topic as well. When I read the information on Intervals.icu, I was honestly quite shocked and annoyed.
While I’m not personally affected since Garmin is my primary data source, I find it absolutely outrageous what’s happening here. These are my data, which I voluntarily provide to Strava for their use. Therefore, it should be my choice what happens with these data and what doesn’t. There should absolutely be options to determine how my data can and cannot be used via the API.
Even though, as mentioned, I’m not directly affected, I consider Strava’s actions extremely disrespectful. For this reason, I will be canceling my Strava Premium subscription. In my opinion, it has already lost its value for some time now, but this was the last straw.
Hopefully (even though I doubt it), enough users will cancel their subscriptions to make Strava realize that they can’t do whatever they want. They have no right to claim sole control over my data – data I only share with them for processing purposes.
Best regards from Tyrol,
Andreas
I don’t understand how this works with Strava own Terms of Sevice which state in plain text that you own your data, but Strava has a license to it. Hence the activity data itself is not your Strava data, but your data stored in Strava. There is some derived data like segments, leaderboards, freshness/fitness etc, which actually belongs to Strava, and it will be in scope of these API changes, but not activities.
You can export data from Strava in bulk. When companies say you own your data, what they offer is a bulk “takeout” feature.
There’s no universal right for being able to export data via APIs. APIs cost a lot of money to set up and maintain.
It’s still a bad move towards their partners and they could have handled it a number of different ways.
the impact for me is that i assume people like yourself and ‘the quantified scientist’, will no longer be able to use strava anywhere in your analysis of actual data, very much playing into the hands of tech ‘journalists’ who pretend their giving us useful metrics, and also the tech companies who seem unable to improve their products
i’m wondering if it’s anything to do with the app(s) revealing the location of persons important enough to be political targets, (via their security detail), and this is the easiet, and dumbest, way to solve that problem
bad day for the ordinary consumer !
Fwiw, I don’t use Strava anywhere in my analysis of data, except in the rare case where a watch doesn’t export a .FIT file (e.g. Samsung devices). In this instance, I can still do that as I always do, by manually exporting the ‘Original File’ from Strava, which continues to exist.
Reason for cancelling : Strava api changes, I do not agree on Strava deciding how the data I upload is used by third party applications, as a paying customer it should be up for to me to decide. If that’s not the case, I am not paying any longer .
Subscription cancelled, data archive downloaded and account deleted – hate corporations that bully in this way – as noted by others further up, the way they treated Relive got my goat and this is just a total piss take.
This reeks of a panic move from Strava, trying to lock the doors before startups leveraging LLMs and AI out-innovate them. I’m going full assumption mode here, but it seems they’re clearly scared smaller players are building better, smarter features that Strava either can’t or won’t compete with. Instead of stepping up their game, they’re doubling down on control to stifle competition. It’s a classic case of protecting their turf instead of improving it, but it’ll probably backfire—users will go where the innovation is.
My message to Strava’s leadership team: Revamp Strava Labs! Assemble a group of engineers who, full skunkworks, build many features using LLMs and see what sticks! Users now know what accuracy to expect from such features, especially with the lab’s label attached. Eliminate all the bureaucratic BS and build features we love and get excited about. You have the infrastructure already (the data, the subscribers, the brand)—focus on creating new value instead of going full defensive and getting outcompeted down the line.
well, look what they came up with regarding AI Insights… if that is the level of innovation Strava Labs is capable of, I see mo future for expansion; it is literally like coping summary of ride data and puting it into chatgpt with command of: “say something about this”. Flyby, heatmaps – that was something fresh. Messaging via the app – maybe. But that is it.
I wonder if they got afraid of what TrainingPeaks didin last week(s) going for Zwift and making it work out of the box. If this model of conducting business continues – especially using doublespeak that is insulting to users intelligence – it will be time to gather all my data, download it and wish Strava all the best. Why it became so popular with companies to use TrumpMusk’on laungage and dropping the hammer on consumers to observe if the outcry will be so lound that they need to take step back… why not going with transparency? That is not the first time they do this…
I think it would be more fun if google updated it’s google play terms and services to “all apps in the play store must allow 3rd party app connections and use, with the user being able to turn it on or off”🤣
Thank you Ray, for that article.
In my case, I am happy, I am always uploading to TrainingPeaks, and also to Strava. That goes for Garmin and Apple devices, my Wahoo is becoming more and more obsolete, that is a pity.
TrainingPeaks is therefore not using any of the Strava data, and I might just cancel my Strava Premium subscription.
That whole thing is a real pity, after all, it is fun to see my friends’ workout and group rides on Strava, maybe in the future I will have to do without that.
All Strava users incensed by this should post a support comment to Strava. Eg
I strongly object to the recent api terms and conditions changes for third party app developers. If you want to improve privacy give me the option to control these factors but don’t deny them. Your ecosystem was part of the reason I susscribe to Strava this is giving me reasons to unsubscribe.
Mark,
that’s an interesting proposition.
To make it effective, I guess, these comments should be both (i) reaching Strava, and (ii) be publicly visible.
What would be an effective and coordinated way to do that?
If I understand all of this correctly, in case I download my data via api/ownapp to my server/db and do my own data analysis and visualisation/share to a coach/family/friends/homedashboard, I may violated the usage of my data stored on Strava?
Basically all my data on Strava should be used/seen on Strava only?
The whole thing is quite interesting, and it goes in steps:
1) We users create data through our activities,
2) Our devices compute and do some data processing with the data,
3) We or our devices upload the data to one or several platforms, including Strava,
4) These platforms somehow transform and aggregate the data,
5) Once step 4 is done, Strava then say, the data is Strava’s data and you, the user cannot use it anymore in the way that you intended from the start.
In the end it would be interesting to see, at what point exactly our data becomes Strava’s data.
Strava seems to work the same way, any of the tech companies, such as Meta and Google work with their users’ data, based on information assymetry. That means, they know what data they collect, they know how much it is worth and they sell that data. The users do not know the value of the data and are never told, how much it is worth. Indeed, these companies keep telling the users, that they are very ethical and do everything they can to protect the users’ data and so on and on.
The difference here is, that Meta, Google and the likes do not charge the users for providing a service to the user, they just sell the data related to the users, Strava instead charges for the services they provide to us, their users, and make a big story about the data, they think belongs to them and not to us, their users and subscibers.
I am afraid that this has been “Strava’s problem” pretty much since they one. What do they offer in fact? Why should you keep paying? Their so called “premium” features are sort of joke… Usually you can find better functionality on other platforms. The biggest things on Strava have always been “social network” and “data integration hub”. If they make the use of API for subscribers only, I would understand it (because they have costs associated with it). And I am subscriber for that reason already now anyway.
Strava necer really positioned hemselves on the market. They are not the training platfor, hell they are not! Nobody will be probably willing to pay for yet another soacial network…. How they want to make money?
@Joerg, so, for example, if Garmin decides to follow the same Strava logic, then already at level 2 it would be impossible to use data and send it to Strava since it is already “manipulated” by Garmin. Strava will have then almost no data, expect the one recorded via Strava app/phone so no, I will not use more than one device to record my run/rides just to upload it to Strava.
My subscription ends in August 2025 and for the moment I’ve cancel the autorenewing. Garmin Connect analysis are better than Strava. Athlete Intelligence is a joke, c’mon..
It’s absurd and the risk is to go back to close systems or bubbles. Sad day…
I cancelled also (auto-renew …. still some months…)
I am cancelling my subscription.This time because of the decision to close tools I use access to MY data.
The real value of (the core of ) Strava is socials and the historical benefit Strava has in the amount of people registered. That is the reason I pay for Strava!
The line of why someone subscribes has always been very very thin. I have never seen much value in the extra features, so this decision does not help the message I spread to other people coach.
Strava should bring *real* value to subscribers. Maybe you should have left the decision of 3th parties using the data, only to subscribers…. (even more non-ethical but at least there would be choice; and bills paid for consuming Strava data using API’s)
Some more feedback:
– the AI is just a stupid worthless repeater, which uses CPU/GPU time, which use electricity resources and as such earth resources
– instead of closing up on data access, Strava should be an enhancement and enriching of data: because it has the data on people that have been running the same segment, etc.
Instead of closing things.
NOT a smart move.
This it: a subscription should enable 3rd party integration, for non-paying users it’s difficult to argue why they shouldn’t be limited to Strava alone.
I’ve cancelled my 10 year subscription- similar to this post I didn’t really use the extra features, but I felt that the facilitation that Strava provided should be paid for.
Take that away?… I’m looking for another platform.
As I posted earlier, have a look at link to fetcheveryone.com
It supports direct import from all main devices, training log, analysis, route planning, competition/leaderboards, training / exploring GPS based games and there’s a social side. Active forum and blogs too.
It is free. Run and developed by one chap, supported by donations, you can back import your old activities. There’s a user suggested features section – they get implemented and rapidly updated with interaction from users.
Hmmmm, “interesting”.
A lot of apps provide option to connect directly to bigger brands (like Garmin for example). But…. For exampe Apple Watch becomes isolated. Integration can only be done on “client” side and that requires the mobile app(s). None a user can do about it. Even if there were mobile apps available, user must install all of them and in some ways use all of them to pull data from Apple Health. Now it was enough to push the fit file from Apple Health to Strava and from there push/pull to other apps (server side integration).
Exactly what I am doing: cycling recorded with Garmin; anything else recorded with Apple Watch. All goes to Strava. Either I accept that not all my data will now make it to all systems or I must move from Apple Watch to Garmin Watch (losing the LTE connectivity on the move). And some apps will maybe not work (properly) anymore (VeloViewer, MyCols, FoodCoach…..).
Now it did not matter what I used to record the activity as long as I was able to upload it to Strava from that device and/or app. So smooth….
An app like run gap or health fit cuts Strava the middleman out
How? How will these apps help me to upload data from Apple Watch to for example FoodCoach app?
e.g. HealthFit allows you to upload Apple Health (including Apple Watch) data to a myriad of 3rd party platforms …
That did not answer my question. For example FoodCoach is not on the list. JOIN isnot on the list.
Look Strava does not have to pffer APIs to be used as “data integration hub”. Of course they do not have to. The question is then “what do they offer?”. Yes, FoodCoach and JOIN (from my example) integrate directly with Garmin and maybe they will offfer direct Apple Health integration. Maybe they will not and I will need to decide if I am still willing to pay them after the functionality is limited (no data from Apple Watch). Is Strava to be blamed for this? No. Will I be willing to pay Strava for their “social network” feature? No.
As I said in my original comment: either the apps I want to use develop the direct connection (web based apps cannot in case of Apple Watch), or I accept not all data will be available in those apps, or I must reconsider if the given hardware is fit for purpose.
I am not blaming Strava and I am not angry with them. I do not understand that move. And I will definitely reconsider keeping my subscription should the “data integration hub” feature be gone.
Yet again – I am not sure how they can think they can earn more money by this. Yes, they may reduce costs because they lower the load on their infrastructure and they do not have to maintain APIs, but no way they increase the revenues.
I feel like this is in part driven by their new AI features. They want people to be attracted to their own platform. We should have sensed this coming when they started offering more “insights” with workouts. It’s very anti competitive and makes it seem like they wanna be the ones to sell you that premium subscription, to give you a reason to need their AI analysis over others. Instead of focusing on marketing a decent compelling product, they just decided to rip the data away from any competitors all together. Sink or swim for those platforms find your data elsewhere! Not cool.
Have they made any high level hires from Apple recently? This smells like an ex-Apple product director is on the loose in their halls…
Strava will notice that a huge amount of customers request a “bulk export” of their data today and are asking all over the web for the best and most open service/platform they can move all their data to, when leaving Strava.
Will Strava reconsider their decision then, or will they continue shutting down their whole platform?
I suspect you overestimate the number of users that will do this. This will go under the radar for most average users I would imagine. I doubt the fitness data geeks that comment on sites like this represent most users.
Well, VeloViewer has 500k users.
Most of the functionality of VeloViewer may disappear (unless Strava rephrases their whole statement another few times to calm down the community…) and I think many of them would notice if the stats basically goes all empty.
I wonder if questioning Strava decisions on activiy titles or description is agaisnt the rules or not
They won’t read it, but anyway if they discovered that, they could easily delete it as fast as they deleted all your URLs from all activities and comments without telling you.
I used to insert the URL to the zwiftpower event below every zwift race, that just disappeared all of a sudden.
Not informing users was a really crappy move. I placed the links to all my official timed race results on my Strava activities. Poof, all gone, without warning, I cannot search and transfer them to Garmin Connect. I will have dig through 10 years of emails and sms to recreate them. They could have kept the links but simply not displayed them, or displayed a text only version that was clickable.
Maybe Elon Musk showed interest in acquiring Strava, so Strava board members are trying to burn the house down before being taken over by good old Elon… 💥⚠️😂
BTW they may also very well play the game….
Imagine they would now announce that you must pay for utilizing the API. People would go mad. Buth they have costs associated with the API (software maintenance and infra operations). So they either must earn money or close it. So now they testing what the community response is if they choose to close it. And in few weeks they come back with the huge announcement: “We listened to your feedback and we found the compromise! We will keep the APIs open to subscribers! And by the way we must increase the price by 15%.” And the community will give them standing ovation. Mental games. Announcing the same today will make many of us to cancel the subscription and go for direct connection wherever possible, accepting some gaps in the integrations. if they scare us to death today by “we will shut down the APIs” we will see them as our heroes later when they ask for money to keep the APIs alive. Risky but smart move.
I uninstalled Strava a few months ago. It didn’t do much for me. Garmin has challenges, segements, courses, and leaderboards- for FREE! It feels like Strava thinks they are really special with an essential service. I say “Let ’em crash!”
I really only use Strava as a data source for Wandrer, and if that’s is broken irrevocably, I’ll drop my Strava account.
I see the discussion that got started last night on the Community Hub has now been deleted. link to communityhub.strava.com
This just seems like a market leader putting up a moat.
What’s Strava’s real problem, its trying to sell data analytics, AI etc, and other people are using Strava’s free data aggregation tool to get the data they need to provide those services in a way that on the one had is a way to get around Strava paywalling that content, but also, are providing better data analytics and insight that Strava.
Seems to me like a pretty classic abuse of dominance and competitive foreclosure play by Strava – its noticeable that this locking down the data and platform is the complete antithesis of the approach being forced on the likes of Apple, Google, etc. but European anti-trust authorities!
Strava is acting as both a data aggregator and a data consumer. No single company should control the aggregated data…to do so gives that company an unfair advantage over it’s competition. Which is exactly the point of this change. Strava doesn’t seem to want to compete… instead they seem to want to dominate the market by eliminating their competition. How very capitalistic.
Time for an independent workout data aggregation company!
I can see a very bright future for the service, let’s call it FCK_STRAVA_API, which for a given user will import raw data from Strava and without making any analytics, it will allow this user to export his data to any other app, as those data will become FCK_STRAVA_API Data, not Strava Data anymore (following Strava’s way of reasoning).
But does this only apply to data created through their platform by using their app or also on data uploaded from other platforms for instance garmin connect delivred through their platform? They seem forget – this is not their data!
I is not the letter I’d combine with Strava’s letter A. It doesn’t sink to the level of artificial stupidity I see elsewhere, but it’s close. I usually call it “artificial banality”.
Strava’s value for me is mostly the social aspect, in particular finding out about road conditions. I follow (with very few exceptions) people who live in my area and ride the same roads. From them I can find out how things are out there from where they’re riding and their comments. A lot of chip sealing was done on local roads this summer, and every year PA DCNR does “spring road destruction”, where they dump lots of loose gravel on the gravel roads up in the mountains (and usually those roads come out from under the ice in fantastic shape). So I get warned where not to go, or at least to take a full suspension mountain bike rather than my gravel bike. I also use ActivityFix and Wandrer, and I wonder what’ll happen with them. (I wish Connect has something similar to ActivityFix.) Most of the people I follow aren’t on Connect because they either use the Strava app on their phones (uggh) or a Wahoo head unit. If people leave Strava, there won’t be much point in me staying.
I did a short search with DuckDuckGo and found link to tryterra.co . Maybe something like that is the solution. (I am not connected to them)
What (if any) is the best current alternative to Strava?
I’ve posted earlier comments but please do check out the site link to fetcheveryone.com
It combines training log, analysis, competition, GPS games, route planning and sharing with a social supportive side.
It’s free to use, supported by donations and independently owned.
Import from all main devices including coros. Previous history can be batch imported from elsewhere – if it’s a big file you contact Ian to get it uploaded. There’s also user suggested features implementation and development.
I’m looking into Fetcheveryone. I do like the gamification. Conquercise is like capture the flag for your area…
“Strava seems to be working very hard to kill off the community”
Yep.
Strava’s business model isn’t figuring out what features it can add for paid users, it’s figuring out what it can remove for those who don’t. It’s done that for nearly a decade.
If it had any kind of sustainable business model it would have been bought out by a bigger tech company a long time ago. Instead, shambles along like a zombie.
This is really disappointing. I miss the days when social media was all about public sharing.
My Strava sharing settings are as public as possible (I’ve had to revert some forced restrictions over the years): all my activities are public unless I’m testing a pre-release device, I contribute to heatmaps, I don’t add privacy zones, etc.
I wonder if screen scraping this public data is a viable approach now that the APIs aren’t?
I plan to do a better job of exporting and storing all my data outside Strava as a result of this announcement. Strava is my source of truth for my last 10+ years of workouts. If Strava bans public exports with such short notice, what’s to stop then from disabling the API entirely and holding all my data hostage on their proprietary platform?
This is ultimately about money, right? It always is. More specifically, it seems motivated by Strava’s inability to effectively monetize their product and develop new, innovative user-facing features.
Strava has the data, but everyone else is kicking their butts in terms of cool features and analysis. I see zero user-facing innovation, and I guess that ultimately comes down to tech, creative, and product development leadership at Strava. Why not invest in building in-app features that everyone loves? If someone has already developed a software product that is successful and popular, re-engineering it yourself is not a huge technical challenge.
If they can’t (or are unwilling to) develop features and innovation in-house, then why not follow the time-tested big tech strategy of buying and integrating your “competition”. That’s what Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc have been doing forever. How much would it cost to buy-out veloviewer? Is it worth the ROI?
Heck, why not just monetize the data access itself? A yearly commercial API fee for connected platforms that are monetized, and/or a tiny data transfer fee of like $0.00001 per MB. Have a subscription tier for $1/month that allows access by outside platforms. If you have (reportedly) 100 million users, tiny increments make for fast money. Even a $1 *PER YEAR* from half your customers is $50M!
They are the most-mind boggling business to me. Seems like they should be printing money.
If anyone in the tech space wants to develop a competitive product, I would jump at the chance to be a part of it.
I love everything you wrote. But strava would by veloviewer or stats hunter and just kill it. Like. Fatmap.
I don’t know if strava hates it’s users or just doesn’t understand them but for me, strava is a conduit to get better data visualization, like veloviewer or stats hunter. I really enjoy comparing year over year and looking at different metrics garmin has some of that but it’s not pretty. And no third parties really seem to be able to reflow garmin data. So I paid strava for it. But I just canceled (officially today with my end day Jan 4). If they want to lock down data I send them from Garmin. Cool. But I’m not paying for it.
Monetize data access when most of the data (99%) they have is freely retrieved via 3rd Parties like Garmin?
Well, I do not like what they seem to plan to do. But… you still have access to your data; and we can not say that it is mandatory to maintain any API. I am just saying that I am sort of OK to pay for feature called “API for 3rd parties”. But if the feature is gone from the product (and I think they have the right to decide what their product offers) I also have right not to buy that product again.
I think the topic is (mis)interpreted like Strava is preventing us to access our data. That is in fact not true. They are changing their product and pretty much removing the feature. I still have access to my data, but the feature which is important to me may be gone soon. If that really happens I will stop paying them. And hopefully find another product fit for purpose.
The timing looks suspiciously like a reaction to the discovery that world leaders were being tracked by those around them (link to apnews.com).
However, all the language around AI suggests it’s more of a coincidence.
My primary use of my Stava subscription is for chasing PRs using Strava Live Segments.
Does anyone know of an alternative to define segments on a map, then load them and race against them?
I can live without leaderboards, rabbits and foxes, I just want to race against me.
Garmin has segments. You can see all of your past efforts. They have lots of filter options. You can compare to others or just compare to yourself.
The world leaders being tracked is not a Strava issue, it’s a lack of personal responsibility, education, diligence, and compliance issue. There is no Strava GPS device, it’s either a phone or watch that is tracking the location. Strava is just using data from another source to aggregate and display …. hmmm.
Thx, Tom. I am referring to the SLS popping up in real time on a ride on my device enabling me to see time/distance gaps as I climb the segment.
Does GC allow its segments to be synced on my device and used in this real time? (Asking because I do not upload to GC.)
@LesMc when I’m on a ride my watch notifies me that I am approaching a segment. As for climbs, the link is the page for Garmin’s “ClimbPro” feature”.
link to garmin.com
You can customize data screens, so I have my watch to automatically scroll through them during an activity. I have the climb screen displayed on activities like road biking, mountain biking, and hiking.
The Garmin Connect website has LOTS of information and options for routes and segments. I can create a course and choose to immediately send it to my watch.
Yeah, if you have a segment in GC, you can have it pop up on your Edge/Forerunner/etc and tell you how you’re doing compared to the KOM/your PR/your connections just like a Strava live segment. It’s a little limited in scope because there aren’t as many segments and there aren’t as many people public on GC (since it seems to be used as a primary data source and aggregator before sending it to Strava for the social features).
My suggestion to you would be to create segments on Garmin Connect where you think there should be one. It’s very easy to do. It has to start somewhere. I’ve created many segments around my area and have received “thank yous” from other Garmin users.
I should have mentioned that I am not a Garmin user anymore (that’s another story). I have a Karoo, so no automatic upload to GC. I could upload to it manually I guess, but certainly there are no segment download options from GC to my Karoo. I have about 120 Strava segments, probably about 30 of which I use regularly, so even if I reproduced them in GC, I could not get them onto my Karoo and race against them or my PRs.
Oh well….looks like Strava has me trapped for the time being.
We need a world wide co-operative to do the Strava job. Needs someone honest, respected and trusted throughout the industry.
Ray?
Curently my Garmin is linked to my Strava account for purposes of relaying the information to New York Road Runners to confirm when I have completed a virtual race. NYRR utilizes virtual races for the purpose of gaining guaranteed entry to their major races. Is this change going to impact the information shared with NYRR?
Ray – thanks for your thorough analysis on this! Have you heard much about the European Data Act that will be official in 2025? It’s kind of opposite of what Strava is saying here and I don’t think this agreement will be enforceable in Europe. Essentially, you have the right to allow 3rd parties to access your data from a digital platform like Strava, and then Strava would by law have to provide the data to that 3rd party.
link to digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu
What’s infuriating about this is it’s not Strava’s date. It my data, our data that we gave to Strava. Heck much of it is Garmin/Wahoo data before it’s Strava’s. Maybe they want to protect their unique IP around Segments and Leaderboards etc but I tend not to view or analyze that in other apps anyway.
Just imagine if Garmin implemented the same API usage rules – Strava would be utterly out of business!
As soon as I saw this I thought of the app Trailforks.com. In their connection toolkit page for users they really make the point their site works better with a direct Garmin upload versus using Strava. API overuse being the main issue. Makes following their recommendation all the easier. I wonder if Garmin and other hardware companies will capitalize on Strava’s misstep? You’ll note in their instructions from the screenshot, they imply they’d like their users to treat Strava as an endpoint for data. Strava is going to turn itself into a data dead end.
To be fair. Outside isn’t the best example. They bought a ton of stuff and try to bundle it. I stopped using trail forks and Gaia when they fell under the umbrella
I wonder where this is coming from. Something you NEVER talk about it is privacy of your data. In fact, I don’t think you’ve mentioned it once in all the years of following you but A LOT of people are concerned about their data and how it’s used. States and the EU are too.
I know you come form the tech side where there is NO bad use of data. ( I will note the ad trackers on this site are ridiculously numerous and do you don’t have what is commonly referred to as a cookies banner)
I will note there is no major federal privacy legislation in the US – so that can’t be the source of the changes. Nor are any state laws effective as of Nov. 1.
I think for points 2 and 3 you are flat out wrong. My own company we strict the use of data for third-party AI models for lots of reason. More and more companies will be doing this after AI scraped a ton of data (possibly illegally or in violation of agreements/terms)
companies are become concerned with data that is leaving their environments. (I know it is user supplied data)
I think you also are misleading the readers on point 3. When you refer to “you” you aren’t referring to the individual user.
California (not to mention the EU) are becoming extremely aggressive in going after misuse of data including the use of AI. I think you spend too much time in your tech bubble- the comments prove it.
And the irony of this “And more hilariously, they added that any users posting to their community hub forums that are “requesting or attempting to have Strava revert business decisions will not be permitted” and summarily deleted” when you’ve deleted such comments on this site.
Ahh yes, our resident troll has arrived (you know you’re literally the only one, right?).
“In fact, I don’t think you’ve mentioned it once in all the years of following you”
I talk about it quite often as it’s required. Though for the most part, within the sports tech segment, these companies are actually quite good with your data (in comparison to most other companies). Thus, it hasn’t needed constant coverage. Even Strava, is actually quite good when it comes to Privacy. Rather, it’s people not understanding the implications of their actions that gets them in trouble (e.g. posting routes from secret military base). That’s something covered numerous times per year by most government security course refreshers, as always, you can’t fix everyone.
“I will note the ad trackers on this site are ridiculously numerous and do you don’t have what is commonly referred to as a cookies banner”
Also not true. You’ve simply clicked agree at some point. Off the top of my head I think we require re-consent every 45-60 days. Either way, you can validate this easily yourself to see the cookie warnings that take up half the page, by opening an InPrivate window to the site again.
“and summarily deleted” when you’ve deleted such comments on this site.”
I allow all the constructive conversation and criticism you want on this site, constantly, for years. Roughly 100K comments or so per year here, plus YouTube. However, my rule is simple, and has remained the same since the beginning. If you post personal information about someone (me or others), the comment gets deleted. If you can’t keep conversations civil, and resort to name calling or similar, your comment gets deleted.
For reference, you’re the only person in the last few years who’s managed to get comments deleted. Just…you. Kinda amazing when you think about the hundred thousand+ people a year, and only one of those people can’t follow basic civil conversations. Have a good evening!
I don’t understand it. In a global market integration is key to success.
By the way, most of the data isn’t generated by Strava, but by external “apps” and equipments. If, for example, wahoo decides to apply the same rules to Strava from their side, Strava couldn’t generate PR’s or KOM’s. If I was involved on the decision, I would gladly serve them with the same recipie to see what would they do.
Very disappointing,
I am using the Strava API for my own personal application, and reading those terms, I would no longer be allowed to use it in that way anymore – not that Strava cares about a one person project, but still.
One other thing about the Strava API that has been bugging me for years, is they removed the ability to change the visibility of an activity via API (public, followers, private). I can understand that it a sensitive thing to allow a app to do this, but it could be guarded by a check-box that you need to enable when authorizing a new app to link with your strava account. Many users have their activities on “Private” by default, and have some certain rules/patterns as to which activities can be made visible…There have been requests on their forums for years for this feature to come back, but no efforts were made by strava.
To work around the issue, I wrote a small application that logged into strava like your browser would (using username + password!), and edited the activity visibility like this, circumventing the API at the cost of needing the strava user credentials on hand.
Since 2024-11-01, strava has updated their website “anti-bot” measures, using Amazon’s Web Application Firewall (Amazon WAF), which makes it a lot harder to “fake a normal browser” logging in – the whole approach becomes highly tedious to keep working. This alone already had me wondering if I should continue to bother with strava, as my activities are private by default and I am annoyed at having to edit them on strava manually (according to the rules I have as to which activities I do share).
Adding insult to injury by also changing the terms of the API usage like this will have me deleting my account.
Anyone here knowledgeable about EU consumer law in this?
When I paid for Strava last May it had the capability to feed data into statshunters and veloviewer, the primary motivation for using Strava. Now they effectively remove this capability.
Can I cancel Strava Premium and demand money back for the 5 months until next May for removing an essential feature of the product?
While I don’t think it might have much legal standing it’s worth canceling and asking support (perhaps ask first).
Countries have been a bit terribile for consumer protection for this type of service. A TV company can kill services you bought the TV for, a game can loose its online servers. Which (UK consumer organisation) is looking to change this, as are others.
I’m not sure about EU law. But for example in Germany you’re allowed to cancel a contract if the other party changes the basic terms (usually that means a price hike) or if they change the product in a way that removes its usability to you. The latter *might* apply here but it’s certainly not black and white. For example, there was a big debate among legal experts if customers could cancel their Pay-TV subscription if the provider lost the rights to top flight soccer games.
Well, this is insane. As a result of this I have just cancelled my subscription. The data, as far as I’m concerned, is mine (they’re just holding it for me), and if they’re going to lock it away… nah, I’m out.
Pontifications:
As far as I’m aware the idea that the data is basically mine is also the thrust of consumer laws like GDPR. Of course, they can add terms and can argue it’s in their interests. Of course, I can choose to not pay for their services. I’ll miss some bits, for sure (I don’t use lots of other apps, other than as feeders), but I’ll live and as a bonus save a bit of money (tempted to give half my next sub fees to something like EFF – this isn’t necessarily illegal, but it does remind me that companies generally don’t have our interests are heart.
Sorry, some typos there.
I might add that on the cancellation reason I choose other and commented how I don’t agree with these changes and that was why I was cancelling (I made a point I won’t support a company that acts like this), then I linked to this story.
Voting with my wallet – the only thing I think I can do. And I may only be one person, but on a recent Carbon Literacy course I went to I saw the best quote, which kinda applies here
“I’m only one person, said seven billion people”. (attribution forgotten… not me!)
Oh, and at the risk of spamming this comment section: MASSIVE thanks Ray, for this post. You _are_ on the consumer side (as well as being aware of the business implications of this). 🙏
Curious as to whether a class action lawsuit against Strava may be valid. After all many folk myself included, paid for a service that has now been crippled.
I’m a 10+year subscriber and just cancelled, telling them they are committing corporate harakiri.
I stopped sharing data with Strava way before this incident due to the fact that Strava requires the removal of all synced data to a connected 3rd party upon disassociation – even though said data was mine and originally recorded independently from Strava. I use https://intervals.icu as my hub. I don’t really care for Strava at all or depend on it.
Very disappointed by this. As an indie developer who builds projects for the love of sport and the community, I’ve always appreciated how Strava’s API has promoted innovation and supported an ecosystem of tools for athletes worldwide.
About two months ago, I launched an (AI) app called Roast My Strava. It gained a lot of early traction and brought together thousands of athletes in a fun, lighthearted way. However, when it hit the 10,000-user limit, I faced weeks of silence from Strava regarding my increase requests.
They eventually responded and granted the increase, but it came just before this announcement, which feels like a significant step backward for those of us trying to create meaningful tools for the community.
I’m frustrated but still optimistic about building for our community, though I’m rethinking how to do so with less reliance on Strava. I’d love to connect with other developers navigating this change—thanks to everyone who has shown support so far!
Protest time?
Anyone else reading this… consider doing what I just did. I renamed my last activity to “⚠ Strava… what are you doing? ⚠”, and I’m about to post a black-out pic as my highlight (only) picture for that activity. I’ll be kinda and use a 1px by 1px image if they let me so I’m not costing them server space 😊
Having just looked at my tech-sites there was a story on ArsTechnica.com (which references Ray, as all good sites do 😁), and I remembered one thing and thought of another as I’m getting more and more annoyed by this:
THIS: “posts requesting or attempting to have Strava revert business decisions will not be permitted.” sounds like dystopian sci-fi. I like the genre, I just don’t want to live through it.
And, as I noted on Ars’ comments: “I’ve never really thought CEOs should resign over all mistakes, but this, for me, is a CEO-shouldn’t-have-allowed-this-and-should-now-resign type level”
[https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/fitness-app-strava-is-tightening-third-party-access-to-user-data.1504203/post-43322772]
I have created a ton of segments in my area (~150). I am actually looking forward to doing that again with whatever startup comes and replaces Strava.
Garmin connect has segments. In fact it’s basically strava, just there is a strava and no one uses connect for social.
@Ray – The biggest value-add I’ve ever gotten from Strava is from their heatmaps when traveling. As an aggregator I actually think this is one of their most valuable features. Is there another service out there that provides similar quality heatmaps? I’m on Garmin connect so I can use Garmin’s heatmaps but obviously a more generic service would provide better data.
I’ve been a ‘free’ Strava subscriber since ~2013. I went ‘3rd party’ when Strava removed a lot of access to historical data unless you went ‘pro’ (First tried Suunto, settled on Garmin). AFAIC, Strava is merely a social media tool that I use to see what new things my friends are up to and watch my segment performances.
I always knew they were using my data and considered that a fair swap for me never having paid for membership. Maybe it’s time to rethink that.
I’ve cancelled my strava subscription and posted on this thread about my utter disbelief of this, however I have been thinking about this, are Strava really this stupid, well it seems so, but it got me thinking.
Strava gets most of its data from 3rd parties, and I recall a stat from Ray I believe, which hilighted that Garmin are by far the biggest source of data for Strava.
If Garmin told Strava they can no longer allow data sourced from Garmin to be reused (sent to a 3rd party) this would force Strava to implement such a stupid change, I’ve certainly not heard of Garmin doing this, but has anybody checked this possibility out ?
Why will Garmin give Strava the data but then not allow them to give it to anyone else, especially since Garmin has it’s own API which smaller 3rd parties can use to get Garmin data directly from data?
The stupid thing is that if Strava get’s away with this, they have given others an easy way to cut them off. When device manufacturers release their own AI tools, under the guise of privacy, they can at the very least prevent any 3rd party (ie Strava) from using device data via their APIs for AI training or AI tools.
Well, I think the time has come to cancel my premium membership. I’ll continue to use the free Strava for the social aspects, but I don’t see any advantage to paying the premium fee if they’re intent on crippling it’s functionality. It’s a shame that they seem to be hell bent on crippling its functionality with 3rd party apps.
Bye Strava. My data. I’m out
I tend to agree with the idea that Strava is mostly a social app. I can understand the points Ray is making, but I’m not that compulsive about my training metrics and etc. I have a Garmin watch and that gives me the basics I need to monitor my training.
Is it coincidence that Strava just released beta “insights” features to subscribers that use AI to analyze and comment on activities and then disallow anyone else from using AI or analytics on user data?
This is some lazy reporting on DCR’s part. I wish DC Rainmaker had bothered to look at an older version of Strava’s API terms before making his video. The whole paragraph about analytics showed up in their API terms between 2018 and 2019.
Here’s what Strava’s API terms were in 2019:
link to web.archive.org
I honestly don’t know what they mean about analytics, but that block of text has existed for more than five years with no consequence. Please do better.
Seems like you didn’t read what I wrote. I specifically said “While portions of the above entry existed in previous API versions, this paragraph has now been expanded to be more precise.”
Also, seems like you didn’t even read what you thought you had, because it expanded quite a bit to include the word “disclose”, as well as the aggregated and non-aggregated bits. As you said, please do better.
Ouch!
I’m done. Was on the edge after they killed fatmap but didn’t integrate any of it into strava. Now, I know they’ll trickle it in over the next few years making it seem like they are doing big improvements. But they should have flipped the switch the day they killed fatmap. This api thing might be reversed but the fact they even came up with it shows how little they care about subscribers. I’m done. I’ll do ride with GPS and may actually finally pay for Intervals.icu now that I am free of strava (a nd likely veloviewer and any other small associated app fees linked to strava).
The only reason to use Strava was to push data to apps like VeloViewer, Wandrer.earth, Statshunters, Squadrats, etc.If they can take the data directly from Garmin then Strava will be really pointless.
Maybe people should ask for a right to be forgotten request and that it covers all data including data which may be aggregated with other users or used in training AI models?
GDPR data requests don’t work like that. As long as they give you your PII they don’t have to provide aggregated data.
“I feel at times that Strava wakes up each morning, heads to work, looks out over the San Francisco Bay from their offices, and asks itself: How can we anger our users and partners today? How can we make everyone’s life more difficult today?
Every time Strava does something good (such as last week’s night heat maps), they immediately go and ruin that good love with something to upset their user base. And obviously, that’s their prerogative as a company. But it just seems that no company in the sports tech space spends as much time and energy proactively trying to anger their users as Strava does.”
Spot on – especially when you are a paying customer
would Starva’s own segment leaderboards go against their own privacy policy?
Was on the fence regarding cancelling my long standing subscription. This is the tipping point. Thanks DCR for cutting sucincintly through Strava’s PR word salad.
The best thing? Head of Product at Strava (Matt Salazar) has to approve any Strava followers on Strava. If you need proof that they lost the spirit of the Strava community, look no further.
You can ride my wheel, but only if I approve you. You can run with me, but only if I approve you. It’s just sad.
How is this different to any other user? It makes more sense than writing specific code just for him.
Thats an odd callout TBF.
99% of Strava users don’t require an approval for follow. It’s very strange to me that the lead Strava product employee (who leads by example) would require this.
Strava built is company on authenticity. This is the anti-thesis of being authentic.
To be fair, if there’s anything I’ve learned from The Internets over the last few years, is that there are some people that are incredibly angry at Strava. Not me-like ranting, but, legit very angry people. Those people do take it out on any Strava employee they can find – regardless of whether or not that Strava employee has any control over those decisions, or deserves such feedback.
Frankly, I don’t blame some of them from having more private accounts. Just like my wife does.
New t shirt idea
I object to the ownership claim Strava has taken with the term “Strava data”. They are mostly talking about *user data* that we have chosen to share with Strava. I would bet that most of the activity data does not originate with recordings in the Strava app but instead comes into Strava from 3rd party integrations with Apple, Garmin, Polar, Coros, Suunto, et al.
Only metadata like leader boards or possibly routes is really distinct to Strava. However the user base also creates the routes so that’s pretty dubious also.
I swear this is what happens when companies have folks making decisions who do not actually use their products or platforms.
Somewhere a lawyer told them these new terms were the best way to legally achieve their goals, without understanding the impact on the Strava community or its business—because they don’t know the community or users of the product or services.
Somewhere some developer pushed out changes breaking fundamental usage features because they don’t eat their own dog food, and don’t know how their “tweaks” impact the ecosystem as a whole.
It’s bloody embarrassing.
I will say, I’ve benefitted from never really getting on the Strava bandwagon. Thankfully.
Apple Health, TrainingPeaks, and a dash of FinalSurge (the latter two paid), plus RunGap to tie them all together (which may be impacted by this, but also I don’t use Strava, so not for me, thankfully!).
A lot of companies who have vibrant, expansive communities built in part on the backs of APIs allowing third party developers to extend their offerings have grown mature, and then brought it outsiders who don’t get it and try to monetize it.
The Unity Game Engine licensing kerfuffle is one example. Some of how Reddit handled its API pre-IPO is another. Facebook has done this multiple times to its API.
I can get where Strava may have issues with some of these third-party services hitting their API too heavily, and causing resource drain. Hosting Strava isn’t free. Then again, you can require companies to PAY for API access. Many commercial cloud services used in business to business settings do that. (In fact, Reddit did this in part . . . although their pricing structure was arguably designed to kill 3rd party apps.)
But that’s not what’s going on with Strava.
Finally, if their PR statements represent their true intent and goals, then fine. Maybe they do. Maybe the goal is *not* to hurt 3rd party apps, but to protect consumers.
And, if so, they should fire their lawyers, because their lawyers wrote API terms that don’t meet their stated goals. Their lawyers wrote API terms that will destroy their community, and possibly their value.
Look—Strava needs to make money. Some folks pay for the premium service. By all accounts, it’s not bad and is comparable to many other fitness tracking toolsets out there (like TrainingPeaks!). There are strengths to it, and weaknesses. It is a good tool for some, not for others. Great.
Maybe they need more revenue. I get it. Cool.
But why either lie about it, or be so ignorant of your own written terms, and what they mean, that you don’t understand the impact?
I’ve been way down on mileage due to a bad cycling accident with a deer. Recovery hasn’t been fun and has been going on for way too long. Just getting back on the bike in any fashion has been a joy and it has been fun to basically just ride for the sake of riding. Along the way during this recovery, I took advantage of a good deal and purchased my first ever E-bike just because I could and because it is a full squish eMTB and the riding position allows me to take some pressure off the broken bits that still remain.
However, in the process of having some fun I ended up top 10 on a local climb and OMG you would think I have become the lowest piece of pond scum shit on the planet because I did not “declare” I was on an ebike
I didn’t even know it was a segment
At first I thought you know what, I almost died…FUCK them. So goddam what, instead of being happy for me for riding again they are going to give me shit about 7th damn place on a meaningless climb in a meaningless community in a meaningless life that NOONE is getting paid on?
like seriously,
Then I started thinking about all the “packs” of riders owning all the non-uphill segments because of drafting and nobody cares about that
Then I started thinking about how I feel like I “must” monitor and give kudos to people I follow every time they take a walk, or go to the gym, or take a piss or whatever less they get “offended”
I wasn’t using Strava for anything other than to get my rides into intervals.icu
so right, wrong, or indifferent, I have used this recent controversy to say fuck it all. The account is GONE.
It feels liberating to walk away