Hacker News Reader

Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Strava stopped innovating years ago and hasn't introduced any useful new features. Although I seldom use Relive, this user hostile move finally convinced me to cancel my paid Summit membership. It's my data, I should be able to use it for whatever I want.

Strava has been promising support for triathlons and other multi-sport activities literally for years but hasn't actually built anything. Right now if you compete in a triathlon it shows up as five separate disconnected activities. And the swim portion can't even be tagged as a race.

Segment leader boards have also become a joke with nothing to prevent cheating or accidental bad data uploads. They claim to have a feature that automatically flags bad activities but it doesn't work at all. It would be trivial to auto-flag activities faster than the world record but they don't even bother to do that. It seems like their engineering organization is just completely incompetent.

View on HN

You have outlined my 3 biggest complaints with Strava. It is so comforting that I am not a "unique and demanding snowflake" for wondering why these features don't exist. Other people have the same problems with Strava as me!.

Strava's lack of multisport has been driving me insane for years. Getting 5 separate activities is stupid, and it seems like at the very least they could figure out how to handle transitions so they aren't their own activity. Surely that can't require a ton of development time. I always have to go through and delete my two transitions (I still have the data in Garmin Connect for training records). This is especially annoying when you consider that they have people (like I used to) who pay $60 per year for premium subscriptions. Meanwhile Garmin is offering it for free with Garmin Connect (after you buy a Garmin device).

Don't even get me started on Strava's lack of support for swimming. Even as a premium (now called "Summit") member, you get nearly no analytics from swimming. It basically shows up as an activity and that is where the functionality ends.

Finally segments are a complete joke. There are segments in my area that even Usain Bolt couldn't beat. There is a 0.8mile long category HC cycling climb by my house that has a "record" of 54 seconds. So I guess I am to believe that someone rode up a 8% grade hill at 60mph? That would be hard to do on a motorcycle, let alone a bicycle. Surely they could figure out how to filter those out.

I'm very interested in how little Strava seem to have got done in the last several years. Same thing happened to endomondo. Are they related? The inertia is surprising.

I dislike hardware based lockin but recently suunto have added features to their new app that have pushed it past the others for route planning for me (like you can do it on a phone then sync route), to my surprise.

When I first joined Strava it felt like they were doing cool stuff with segments but it stagnated.

Endomondo seemed to stop evolving around the time it was acquired by Under Armour. MyFitnessPal suffered a similar fate.

> Endomondo seemed to stop evolving around the time it was acquired by Under Armour.

I've noticed the same. Among my issues with it is that the accuracy of distance traveled has been way off for more than two years. Some releases it tracks optimistically high, other releases it tracks consistently low. This has been persistent over multiple phones and multiple Android releases. I've compared it to Google maps, mapmyrun, and my car odometer and it's always off.

I'm strongly tempted to write my own "anti-social fitness app" that just collects data and exports it.

That's pretty much what Google MyTracks was. Of course, it's been discontinued.

Every time Under Armour buys an app it completely stops growing or improving the app. Any fitness app developers out there need to know that selling to Under Armour means the end of your app.

Would you end your app for 500 million?

They hadn't released anything new for a long time when that happened either. There doesn't seem to be any pressure to innovate in the fitness tracker space.

I used to commute by train and bike, and would sometimes forget to turn strava off before getting on the train. I would have to go back and delete these myself because strava rarely caught them. How do they not have a filter for speeds in excess of 60mph? that should be pretty obviously not human powered. Not to even mention the rise of e-bikes...

> How do they not have a filter for speeds in excess of 60mph?

Pro cyclists can hit 80 mph downhill. I agree that they should do something, but whatever model Strava uses would need to be better than just filtering out anything >60mph.

https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/racing/tour-de-france/122...

You can pretty easily crop your Strava activities when you leave your recording on longer than intended.

You can crop the ends of a ride, but not the middle. My guess is OP was cycling to the train station, took a 60mph train ride, then cycled the rest of the way. Wanting to clip out the middle bit. And I don't think Strava can do that. But to be fair, technically that would be two distinct rides .

You can split a ride, then crop. Strava's features in that area are actually excellent.

I kind of get the feeling they're a bit stale too.

Their app has not been working real well on my Android phone lately.

The only reason I have the 'pro' version is the "safety" feature that lets my wife know where I am, approximately.

Anyone got a good alternative for that?

Thinking of getting a Wahoo Elemnt Bolt... real time location update could integrate with that too.

If you're on iOS there's location sharing/ find my friends?

Garmin LiveTrack is the same as Strava Beacon. But it might not be a "good" alternative. Many users have reported that LiveTrack fails to start reliably, or cuts out in the middle of activities.

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=HbqxxbiBGA3mDhlLX4GUw8

I haven't tried Wahoo.

I've had the same thing happen with wahoo multiple times.

My family has tried Garmin LiveTrack and it RARELY works. We have 4 people with 4 different devices and all of them are Garmin's most premium devices (Garmin Forerunner 935) and it fails almost every time. We all just gave up and have turned it off at this point.

If you're on Android (maybe even if you're not?) you can use Google Maps to share your location with specific people for a specified time, or indefinitely.

The iPhone Google Maps app has the feature, although I haven’t turned it on so can’t say how well it works.

It's pretty useful to have this tied to the actual ride; otherwise you're bound to forget it and leave it on, or off.

Also, you want some velocity information and/or history, so that someone can see that you've stopped moving and for how long.

Check out Glympse.

That requires allowing Google to retain your geolocation data.

Is Strava a more reliable partner in keeping this data safe than Google?

> The only reason I have the 'pro' version is the "safety" feature that lets my wife know where I am, approximately.

>Anyone got a good alternative for that?

Take a look at Life360. You don't need the paid version to do what you're asking for.

On IOS, go to the person in Contacts and choose Share My Location. Let’s you choose to share for 1 hour, 1 day, or indefinitely.

Specialized ANGi is a Bluetooth hardware dongle that attaches to your helmet and will allow a contact to live track your ride (using Specialized’s app on your smartphone) and can also detect crashes and automatically send a text message to a contact. It’s available to purchase on its own or included with many Specialized helmets. I have one on a new MTB helmet after a recent crash on a trail.

https://www.specialized.com/us/en/angi

The Wahoo Elemnt Bolt is great!

"Share Live Location" on WhatsApp. Works better than the Strava locator.

I'm also going to cancel my Summit membership over this crap, plus the lack of compelling features. The only reason I left the subscription going this year was to show support for an app I use, but given that article, I no longer feel like doing that.

There are built-in ways to do that#

Android: android.com/find

iPhone: find my iPhone, find my friends.

I think I trust Apple's implementation more.

Also, SnapChat has a similar platform-agnostic feature, if you're willing to give them your data.

Same here. Back to free and it'll stay that way. They seem more interested in mining and selling the data than improving the user experience and features for the suppliers of the data.

> Right now if you compete in a triathlon it shows up as five separate disconnected activities

Five separate disconnected activities?

Yes, they are not associated with eachother at all. You will get an activity for:

1. Swimming 2. Transition #1 (Swim to Bike) 3. Cycling 4. Transition #2 (Bike to Run) 5. Run

They are completely disconnected. Not linked, or "related" to eachother in anyway. It just shows that you went for a swim, a run, a cycle, a run, and another run. (Transitions show up as runs). Worse yet, it has a hard time linking you together with other people because they are separate events. So you might have raced with someone else but you were starting a bike while they were finishing a swim, so Strava's algorithm gets confused and can't link you together like it does when you run marathons together and stuff like that.

I suspect GP had the same confusion I did, that your triathlon was five components, not that they were separately. But you have answered that, the transitions between activities counted too.

The network effect strikes again ...

Hey to be fair they just innovated a feature that looks exactly like Relive.

I don't see how that could possibly be connected to 86ing Relive though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com