As of 2 October, Strava apparently sued Garmin, as reported by DC Rainmaker. In a move lacking any foresight1 or hindsight2, Strava is complaining about Garmin’s API brand guidelines less than a year after Strava did the same thing, to much disappointment for users. Some people will call it another of Strava’s many stupid decisions. Some people will call it enshittification. Both are right. I’d add another term: plain stupid.
Strava as social media
Strava is essentially social media, but with an outdoors, workout, or general position-based spin. It’s great for sharing the route of your latest run. It’s fun to use and generally works quite well.
A run through London, shared on Strava. Source: Strava app, own workout
It integrates smoothly with many platforms. Have an Apple Watch? Just download the Strava app and you’re good to go. If you have a Suunto, just connect it. If you have a Garmin, connect the two platforms and all your workouts will sync to Strava. And if nothing else works, you can always upload your GPX or FIT files to Strava and it will share your workout.
Then people give you Kudos, which of course tickles our reward centre in just the right way. And while I’m typically sceptical of all the dopamine apps, if it gets people to go for a run, I guess that’s okay3.
Now, of course, some people are addicted to dopamine, but I don’t think Strava users are as affected by this as users of other social media apps. So what happens when you can’t use Strava with Garmin anymore (at least not easily)? A large chunk of people will just leave Strava.
And to be fair, that very much includes me. I think it’s fun my friends can see me run or ride, but as soon as it becomes annoying for me to add my workouts to Strava, I’m going to stop doing so. And probably delete my account.
Strava as a workout platform
Of course, other people consider Strava to be a workout platform. And there are a few workout features, which is fair enough. But if you look at Garmin, from a pure workout-platform perspective, Garmin is better. It gives you more insights (not just for workouts, but other health data from during the day).
And if you’d like to look at other options, Runalyze probably gives you much better features. Other platforms also have better training features or can produce better training plans.
Long story short, I don’t think Strava is a great workout platform, and I’d put it much more in the social media basket.
Lawsuit prediction time
What do I think will happen with the lawsuit? Well, if anyone with any sense gets to Strava, they’ll probably drop it and figure out how to work with Garmin. But based on previous experience, Strava is going to go ahead, and I guess we hope Garmin doesn’t cut off their data supply.
People with Garmins use Strava; they paid for an expensive GPS watch and are much more likely to also pay for Strava. ↩︎
Suffering from short-term memory loss, Strava complains about API guidelines asking them to do about the same thing they asked less than a year ago. ↩︎
In my opinion, chasing dopamine is one of the biggest problems we currently have-at least the dopamine provided by apps. ↩︎