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Comment by piquadrat | Hacker News Reader

What's ironic in this whole situation is that Strava themselves are extremely dependent on a 3rd party API: workouts from Garmin. I don't think there are public numbers on the percentage of total workout data comes from Garmin, but looking at their own status page gives an idea: https://status.strava.com/

The graphs for "Uploads" and "Uploads from Garmin Connect" are virtually identical. Seeing that, I'd be surprised if Garmin was contributing less than 75% of total uploads.

If I was invested in Strava, I'd be somewhat concerned right now that Garmin could pull a Relive on Strava...

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I think Garmin reasonably sees Strava as a boon to their business. Before it came out, most cyclists had simple odometer style bike computers rather than gps devices. GPS computers existed but there wasn't much you could do with the data. Strava should likewise see that services like Relive only increase customer satisfaction and engagement with Strava, especially given that Strava doesn't have the technical wherewithal to add new features, like, ever (my personal suspicion is that all engineers are constantly in a performance code red, trying to get hosting costs down).

Garmin sells hardware and Strava is at best a brand. 3rd parties could replace strava.

Social lock-in.

I've been using Strava since 2011... but garmins since 2005. Used RunningAhead.com for many years. Then MotionBased once I got Garmin. They got acquired by Garmin I believe and it became what is now My.Garmin. Strava has a social lead on them, but My Garmin has basically the same functionality as Strava. What gives Strava the nod is they pull info from many devices, not just Garmin. But if Garmin cut off Strava; most of us would just use My Garmin.

All that those graphs being the same tells you is that the percentage of uploads that come from Garmin Connect is fairly stable. That could be true regardless of if it's 10% or 90%.

The incident history lists a garmin connect outage on June 30. The GC uploads graph shows a corresponding dip and surge then, while the total uploads graph looks normal for the day. That suggests that a temporary GC outage didn't significantly change things.

>If I was invested in Strava, I'd be somewhat concerned right now that Garmin could pull a Relive on Strava...

you mean pull a Strava on Strava?

No, the other way makes sense. "Do to Strava what Strava did to Relive"

But Relive didn't "pull" anything on Strava, therefore saying that doesn't make sense.

Doesn't it work in the opposite direction, with Garmin pushing data to Strava? Also I value having Strava segments on my Garmin bike head unit, so I'm sure the value is going in both directions here.

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