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Hi Footpath creator. I'm a runner and happy user of your app for many years. I just wanted to say thank you. Regardless of what Strava does, I'll continue to support your app.

Edit: putting my money where my mouth is, I just realized I’ve had a lifetime membership purchased in Oct 2014 but that doesn’t help you any going forward, so I just purchased the yearly elite subscription. I hope you’re able to continue to develop the app.

Thanks! I really appreciate the support.

FYI: the press kit link on your website is dead (https://www.dropbox.com/sh/apent333tlqd141/AABfqlO4ONXmp3z6h...)

Ditto for me

This is pretty much standard in the industry, isn't it?

Nobody implements a feature from a competitor and says "hey, we copied this from X".

Look at Android & iOS, with an eternal back-and-forth copying (notifications from Android->iOS, permissions from iOS->Android, etc.)

And coming up with the idea doesn't have to mean inventing the idea, it can simply be "why don't we implement this cool feature that someone else is using?".

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

But there's a difference between merely copying an idea, and copying it and also publicly claiming you came up with it.

They literally claim to have come up with it on their own. It's the first sentence in the quote.

We accept too much PR bullshit origin stories. If you find yourself coming up with a cutesy, exaggerated narrative of how a feature began, don't.

I cannot find it in me to give a shit about glossy origin stories and I doubt most devs care.

Surprisingly enough, when Instagram copied Snapchat's stories feature, they credited Snapchat.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/02/silicon-copy/

It is really shitty that there is no credit or attribution whatsoever, and I understand how you feel. Some UX designer / product designer at Strava copied your idea and claimed it as their own.

There's a difference between spending days or weeks researching competitors and formulating your own composite of something and what happened here.

Strava doesn't really have any legal risk by just admitting that they copied you. The evidence is there. It's just managers and their design subordinates wanting to save face.

I don’t really see the reason to credit here. As a product developer you obviously draw inspiration from your competition, and do whatever you need to keep up and hopefully get ahead. This is in my opinion exactly the same as Instagram implementing stories from Snapchat. Doing so is perfectly fine, entirely legal, and in this sense being a gentleman and not implementing the feature will cause you to be set back compared to the competition.

Why are you bringing up the question of if it's illegal or not when no one else is? There's no dispute as to whether or not it's illegal -- it isn't. There's no argument there. There's realistically, nothing to be afraid of from a legal standpoint, which is what makes the behavior from organizations with large legal resources so puzzling.

People keep bringing up Facebook/Instagram and Snapchat. Facebook/Instagram has had no issue with admitting that Snapchat was an inspiration, so that doesn't help your argument. The issue here is credit and attribution, not legality or morality.

This is uncool of Strava to the point that I'm quite certain that I don't want a Strava subscription anymore so I cancelled it just now.

> This is in my opinion exactly the same as Instagram implementing stories from Snapchat.

As someone in an earlier comment pointed out, Instagram credited Snapchat.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/02/silicon-copy/

> The one thing you never hear in Silicon Valley is an entrepreneur admit they copied someone else. Yet there in the headquarters of Facebook, the world’s most prolific product cloner, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom surprised me.

> It is really shitty that there is no credit or attribution whatsoever

As pointed out on Twitter, the Footpath app isn't complying with the attribution guidelines for the OpenStreetMap data that it uses:

https://twitter.com/iamnunocaldeira/status/11011052697933086...

OSM requests that "for a browsable electronic map, the credit should appear in the corner of the map". Footpath doesn't do this. It hides it away on a credits page.

Using the volunteer work of thousands of mappers, then refusing to comply with their stated attribution request, is really low. I had a lot of sympathy with Footpath before I realised this.

This is shitty, and if your post is true, I hope Footpath's owner addresses it, since they are (or were) actively participating in this discussion.

If you click through to the Twitter thread, there is a very active discussion and there still seems to be a lot of disagreement within the OpenStreetMap community on the topic of attribution, particularly on mobile.

Footpath uses the Mapbox SDK under the hood, and I was following Mapbox's documentation on attribution when I integrated the SDK.

I'm following the conversation, and plan to update the attribution once some consensus arises from the discussion.

Most of the "disagreement" is from Mapbox.

I'm of the opinion that if it's out there, it's fair game to copy. It's the original holder's responsibility to include a little je ne sai quoi to prevent that from happening

Speaking as someone who had his entire codebase ripped off and rebranded, whole cloth. (Though they forgot to edit the EULA)

Hi,

Thanks for commenting, and for your work on Footpath. I hadn't seen it before, I'll be downloading it now.

You have stumbled across one of 'problems that many startups rarely address'. I've been involved with several startups and heard hundreds of pitches; and as somebody naturally focused more on the product side, I always get stung when a more pragmatic (i.e. money-orientated - usually an investor) person says "you'll be crushed as soon as you succeed!".

The simple fact is that as soon as a small service invents a product or feature, and shows that it works (such as your app), the big fish are going to ask themselves "which is cheaper: copying the feature, or buying you out?"

As you have no patents, it is naive to think that Strava (or any company) would feel any "ethical" (as you said in your article) qualms about copying you. They had an engineering team look at it (as your server logs show), and report that they could probably copy the feature in a few months i.e less money than they thought it would take to buy you out.

> The issue as I see it is that Strava is being misleading in saying they came up with an idea themselves and can innovate quickly, when in fact the data shows otherwise.

What possible reason would they have for doing otherwise? In the quotes you chose in your post, there are no explicit lies - they don't claim to have invented it, they just say they "came up with the idea for the mobile version". Why would they promote another service needlessly?

I admire you for having created a great product, which I will undoubtedly use. But if you want to create a great business in the future, think from day 1 about how to protect yourself for when it gets successful.

> What possible reason would they have for doing otherwise?

Ethics?

What possible reason would they have for doing otherwise?

The questions re ethics that I'll ask their employees in interviews, should they ever happen to interview with me.

Well, Strava is long past the tipping point where official communication stops making sense and degenerates into meaningless corporatese where any tiny UI change is heralded as the unique innovation that will better our lives forever. This isn't news.

they're describing building a path based on historical data. that's not UI. It is pretty cool.

But... it's exactly UI.

Routing augmented with historical data has been their standout feature ever since their first baby steps in route planning, it's pretty much orthogonal to the input method.

Unrelated to the footpath UI: last time I checked that historical data did not exactly lead to superior routing at all, because too many different activity types got bunched together: you don't want to get sent down that road that is only good for running/riding when it is closed to traffic for a major event once a year, which causes enough trackings to light it up like crazy on the heatmap. You don't want to go down that immensely popular gravity MTB trail on your roadbike. The list goes on. I get much better routes from a engines working on a plain OSM+elevation dataset. I don't know wether that is because I treated it before they made great improvements, because they have never really tried our because they tried and failed to make it better. I suspect that it is "never really tried" because I expect the kind of talent Strava attracts to easily ML those problems away if they would/could really put their minds to it and because lack of depth seems to be the universal rule for all Strava features outside the narrowest core of, I don't know, "competitive social".

PS: didn't even mean to refer to the introduction of footpath-style UI in "UI change". Initially I wrote "UI color change", but then decided to dial down a bit on exaggeration. But it kind of makes sense either way.

Oh, and the "footpath UI" certainly is UI, but neither the kind of superficial change that I intended to refer to nor purely a frontend change, it certainly does need considerable algorithm work on the backend.

Personally I find "the footpath UI" very cool on a technical level, but perfectly useless on the level of actual utility for my use cases: as a cyclist I always go either completely without a pre-planned route or with very specific goals in mind (either destination only or with very opinionated tweaking for every detail of the route), never something like "this shadow, that direction, about xyz long". I understand that runners might have more firing needs ("find something nice that connects me through park X, garden Y and gets me back along the waterfront, 90 minutes at peace Z")

At this point, your best option is to try to license or sell your tech to a Strava competitor. Fitbit, Garmin, UnderArmour (MapMy*), Asics (Runkeeper) come to mind.

They have the resources to overwhelm your work within the year. Hopefully your lawyer has already put you on this path.

Edit: If there are any Fitbit folks in here, I would kill for this feature. Doubly so if my watch's GPS route corrected itself if it matched the predefined route.

One of Strava's largest competitors actually reached out a few years ago interested in licensing Footpath's tech, but we decided not to move forward on the deal for various reasons.

I'm not so worried about any of the above putting Footpath out of business. Footpath goes after a deep niche in a way that competitors are unlikely to imitate.

Yes, that's where I'd focus my efforts. Stay focused on the positives here vs bitterness and negatives. Continue doing what you're doing, which is to utilize the current situation for as much awareness building as possible for your niche application. Have you seen an uptick in interest since this all began? Good luck to you.

Ok, your app rocks. Mapped out all my standard routes quickly and I didn't need to create an account.

You've got me half way to believing you can hold out.

> Footpath goes after a deep niche in a way that competitors are unlikely to imitate.

Why call them competitors then?

Oh, and kudos (sorry) for committing to the niche, sounds like like you are bootstrapping because I don't think that any investor would allow that. We need more of that, not another overfunded experiment in converging on the biggest market.

Sorry this happened to you, something very similar happened to my company, but thankfully we had filed a provisional patent. At the end of the day, all you can do is take solace in the fact that you know they copied you even if they wont admit it. If you do think there is any patentable IP in there, you have a year from when you first built/disclosed it to file, so might be an option?

>At the end of the day, all you can do is take solace in the fact that you know they copied you even if they wont admit it.

I'd avoid getting into that mindset. Fight tooth and nail for what's owed without damaging your quality of life. Ideas and opportunity like this don't come around often in life.

The good news is, had Strava not demonstrated a...lack of creativity, this story wouldn't have shown up on HN, and I wouldn't have downloaded your app. I've played with a total of 60 seconds, and...holy shit, that's cool. Expect some in-app purchase money soon, I foresee getting a ton of use out of this.

(Strava can do what they want, I gave up on them a while ago.)

Maybe it's not the user interface that's novel, it's how they use their data? Does Footpath have something like heatmap data that it uses to chart a path?

> The issue as I see it is that Strava is being misleading in saying they came up with an idea themselves and can innovate quickly, when in fact the data shows otherwise.

Is there a real issue with this, or are you being petty? Is there a legal complaint to be made, or are you just trying to smear Strava or gain attention for yourself? Marketing constantly exaggerates how novel or innovative new technology is.

Your app looks really cool; too bad I can't try it out due to no Android version.

Are there any plans for an Android or device-agnostic (i.e. web) version?

Yes! An Android version will be coming later this year.

I'm a fellow runner and have been looking for something like this for a long time. Going to give it a try! Thanks for making it!

Ironically, I wasn't aware of footpath until just now- so perhaps this is actually good for you :)