Strava Just Sued Garmin: Demands Garmin Stop Selling Devices

Hilarious.

Strava literally only exists because of Garmin [and Apple, others] data. They offer no value, contribute nothing, and pretty much just monetize the fact that Apple and Garmin haven't shared data directly between their platforms. They only exist, because they exist, and their userbase has "chosen" them as the social standard.

And lets be honest, they suck for anything that isn't cycling. Garmin and Apple recognize that the vast majority the users are casual hybrid athletes.

As such, doing anything to jeopardize their position as the "neutral ground" in the non-data-sharing war between Garmin and Apple is pretty stupid. And besides, vibe-coding a Strava replacement would take like all of 7 days.

I really hate Strava. Strava (and anything that replaces it in the same function) exists as a pointless social media layer on top of what Garmin/Suunto/Polar provide.

There is really no reason to use it, and I've seen so many new runners come and go, because they treat Strava the same way people treat social media in general. They see others doing high mileage, and hard intervals, they try to emulate it (from many people) and they end up with stress injuries or burn out.

There's no guidance, and it shows you a display of performances from people of all sorts of ability (I see two literal Olympians on my regular run route) who took time to get where they are. Newcomers can see that and try to emulate it too quickly and injure themselves. There's no warning for somebody going from 10k a week straight to 30k the next week, 40 the week after, 50, so on. But any runner would tell you to follow a 10% rule. Strava doesn't even give a warning.

My local running route is plagued with cyclists causing disturbances and near-misses for the sake of Strava segments (small parts of routes with leaderboards), despite being pedestrian priority.

I just can't think of anything Strava offers besides the utility to like somebody's bike ride or run, which is probably something you could already do elsewhere. It trims tons of the data that Garmin provides, puts up leaderboards (apps with leaderboards almost always incentivise the wrong method of doing something), and they promote competition to people brand new to running, usually in the guise of runners who have built up properly over a longer timespan.

I won't comment on the validity of patents or legal stuff because I don't know. But Strava is playing a very dangerous game here with their user base. I would hazard that a very large segment of their users are far more enthusiastic about Garmin than they are about Strava itself. Do you really want to anger your own users?

Even if Strava wins, they lose.

I love Garmin and Strava. But all good things come to and end. It disappointingly fits the familar pattern.

Innovative product --> popular, profitable --> greed prevails --> product declines --> alternatives emerge --> community fractures

The CPO of Strava went over to Reddit to “set the record straight” and just wow.

As a very avid runner. The only reason I have Strava is because others have Strava. It is totally interchangeable with whatever someone comes up with next.

But my Garmin? that's a very expensive hardware choice that you have zero ability to change. And I wouldn't be the only one here.

Suunto, Coros and Polar just don't compare. Garmin has really tried pushing a few features into its Fenix line that long distance runners like myself don't care about.. and Coros have been very aggressive with trying to lure us to them.

But once again... It's a very expensive hardware choice that I make once every 5-10 years.

It would be if a social media app decided to stop making an app on either iPhone or Android.

People won't just swap hardware to use software. We would swap software.

> But what I can tell you is that if I were someone on Wall Street looking at this situation, I’d be doing a solid double-take of Strava’s leadership right now. You’ve just poked a bear that virtually never loses patent disputes, and done so by picking a patent that’s likely to get nullified, while concurrently being upset about something that happened 10 years ago. All while running the risk of Garmin simply saying “No problem, let’s turn off the API from Garmin to Strava”. Instantly, you’re hemorrhaging paid Strava users. For what reason? Just because you don’t want to put tiny source/attribution text on a display page somewhere?

This seems right to me - why, when moving to your IPO, would you do this?