Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps | Hacker News Reader

Strava cuts off leaderboard for free users, reduces third party apps

dcrainmaker.com

149 pointskylebarron111 comments

Giving zero days notice to your 3rd-party developers is one way to anger a relatively powerful bunch of your users. Many people will find today that their hobby/side-project is now dead in the water. I hope nobody was relying on any income from software using these APIs. But the 'best' bit:

"We realize these changes could be especially challenging for some of you, so they’ll be non-breaking for 30 days, returning empty data during that time so you can make necessary adjustments"

What on earth is non-breaking about this? I have not enjoyed working with the Strava API myself but thankfully I have not wasted as much time as some poor devs. The thing is a total mess as it is, parts of the API were effectively crippled beyond use following some bizarre privacy-based change some time ago.

Get your act together Strava.

> Giving zero days notice to your 3rd-party developers is one way to anger a relatively powerful bunch of your users.

I understand the frustration, but I also understand Strava's desire to rip the band-aid off and just shut it down.

When it comes to free APIs, a sunsetting period gives a lot of people the idea that they can change the company's mind if they complain loudly enough, make enough noise on social media, or threaten boycotts and other punishments for the company. Ironically, the longer the sunset period, the angrier people get.

Also, I'm not convinced the 3rd-party API consumers are particularly powerful in this case. Strava is obviously focusing on profitability, so removing access to a free feature that appears in other company's apps isn't likely to make much difference to the company.

Their plan sounds like exactly what they need to do: Focus on building a core product that people will feel the need to pay for. Giving 90% of the value proposition away for free, including letting it show up in 3rd-party apps, isn't a great path to profitability unless they have another 10% of extremely valuable paid add-on content. As a Strava user, I've never felt compelled to upgrade because all of the functionality I actually wanted was free.

I agree, I don't think they have much power. But what I said was they are relatively more powerful, and I meant compared to regular free users. Some 3rd-party devs will have apps with many, many users and those users will likely value the work the developer has put in. They will be forced to relay the news to all their users right now and I imagine they'll still be pretty angry about it.

And I also entirely agree Strava needs to change. Their strategy has been non-existent for years. I was a paid subscriber for around 2 years. In that time I dutifully (naively) submitted bug reports and feature requests since I wasn't really getting much use out of the premium features but I wanted to support it. However, I never saw any value in the few changes they made so I figured my support was misplaced. I've been a happy free user ever since. I use their platform as a way bring together my data that's spread across 9 years and various Garmin, Wahoo and TomTom devices. I put quite a lot of value in that data and I trust Strava with it all. I definitely trust them less now. I think they could have handled this a lot better.

At least Strava is reasonable about getting your own data out of it. Not sure if this applies just to EU users, but it's easy to download a full archive with the original uploaded gpx/fit files (whether they came from a manual upload or a 3rd party). Last time I checked (which wasn't too long after GDPR was introduced), Garmin didn't really support a bulk download of the raw data, and neither did Fitbit.

You can do a bulk download of FIT files directly from Garmin devices using a USB cable but eventually older activities get purged. There is an API for Garmin Connect which you could use for bulk download but it isn't really open. You have to sign a license agreement with Garmin and adhere to particular terms.

Garmin Connect (website) > Activities > Export CSV

Exported several years worth of activities with all data collected by my watch.

CSV export is very limited. It lacks the second-by-second data in the original FIT file which you need for real analytics.

While not official, there is a script posted to the Garmin forums which allows for bulk download/export of FIT/TCX/etc data.

https://forums.garmin.com/apps-software/mobile-apps-web/f/ga...

Here's a version I've improved a little + adding export of "wellness" data. This thread was a good reminder to push my changes out to github. https://github.com/bbbbbr/garmin-connect-bulk-export

Edit, add:

Lastly, while the UI has some quirks and it doesn't have a social component, My Tourbook is a solid offline, cross-platform alternative to the online fitness repositories. There is something to be said for having complete control over your data (make sure to do backups). http://mytourbook.sourceforge.net/mytourbook/

Ok, so things haven't really changed that much. They don't actively prevent you from getting the data, but they don't make it easy either.

> When it comes to free APIs, a sunsetting period gives a lot of people the idea that they can change the company's mind

Also it gives bad actors the idea to extract all the data they can get, before access is gone, leading to many uncontrolled pools of personal data.

I am not sure the current state, but they were looking for a CTO in ~2019 for what seemed like a very long time. Current CTO specializes in ML, so maybe current team isn't really aware of working in the real universe of large applications w/ partners and partner communication. (Conjecture)

BC ML background is mostly data driven, internally focused

The API changes impact 3rd party apps that deal with segment and segment leaderboard data. That is not trivial and surely the reason many people use veloviewer. Seems as though 3rd party apps focused on aggregate stats and exploration (statshunters, wandrer.earth, veloviewer's explorer tiles feature) will not be impacted afaict. When I first read the post, my heart sank as these 3rd party exploration layers have given me a whole new reason to ride.

Is this affecting your app negatively? They reached out to us a few months ago, and didn't directly state what they were doing, but strongly suggested we be prepared for changes to the API.

No, I don't use the leaderboards/segments at all fortunately. But I am concerned the APIs I do use will stop working next week. It's really nice they contacted some API users about incoming changes but outside of this inner circle it will have come as an unpleasant surprise today.

Out of interest, how did you prepare for unstated API changes? What if their change had crippled your integration, or did they contact to inform you it wouldn't?

We speak to them a few times a year, it was just kinda mentioned that some changes were coming to leaderboards. We had been considering using some of the learderboard stuff, so it was fortunate for us that they mentioned it.

I can answer this in two parts, as we are both consumers of the Strava API, as well as providing an API (of non-strava data) to other businesses.

When using another API, you always have to be prepared for that data to not be available. This isn't just from a business point of view, but technical as well. Will a change in their API cause your entire app to fall over?

Even with our Strava integration, if Strava cut off access, the users can still upload their GPX tracks directly, so it would definitely hurt, but not take us down completely.

When we are working on our own API, man..I'll be honest, it's hard. From a technical perspective managing lots of versions running at the same time can be a pain, and add quite a bit of challenge to engineering. We have had to remove features, and we've reached out to our API users who use those features to say they are going away (or sometimes we just turn them off, and nobody notices).

When we've had to turn off features, it's usually a business case, just like Strava, and to be honest, our customers have understood why we make the change, and have been accepting of it.

Sounds like you're a Strava user, we built https://ayvri.com

No, but it's not just falling over entirely that's the problem. APIs go down all the time so that's a case you'd hopefully handle gracefully. But when your project suddenly and silently produces an empty blank result, say. And you learn that's not some transient issue, that's how it is now. That's a huge breaking change for you. A non-breaking change, at least in the short-term, would be to continue providing the old data as is. Yes, the project might still be dead but how about showing people just an ounce of respect? This isn't rocket science, this is customer relations, and yet an established company like Strava still behaves this way.

I appreciate you sharing this. Perhaps I am an idealist but it doesn't hurt to tell consumers that you are going to break the API contract you made with them. It's how I choose to treat the people I work with because I want to keep working with them. Supporting your old stuff is hard and frustrating when internally you've moved on, I get that, I do it too. Both as a consumer of free APIs like this and in my day job where there's obviously money involved too. But even with a free API like Strava's there is value for both sides, without that value at least one side wouldn't even be there. If you want to take advantage of that value in the long-term. there is an underlying agreement you don't screw each other over. If you do play these unprofessional games then don't expect people to be happy about it, don't expect them to be understanding, and don't expect them to work with you again.

I'm not arguing against making changes if they need to made. I'm arguing against arrogant and/or lazy companies that screw people over when they implement their changes in this way. These companies can do better and so we should call them out on it.

Yeah, Strava had a big organizational change about 6 months ago when the original founders returned. I think the previous management burned some bridges. The original guys are making good improvements, and I think their minds and hearts are in the right place. If they knew they were going to screw somebody over, I assume the BD/API guys would have reached out, if they were aware.

Literally lol'd. That's such a corporate IT department/consulting type sentence.

"We aren't breaking the API, because its still being delivered to you. There'll be no data come through it, (and who would ever connect to an API to extract/rely upon the data coming through it) but the API IS BEING DELIVERED SO ITS NOT BREAKING!!!!"

Literally the old consultant joke: "Here's your warm coffee cup. What?! You wanted coffee in it?!"

As a non-paying user, this seems to be mostly fair. I used to do pretty remote trail running, and the route building feature was great for putting together a route and exporting it to my watch. If I get back into that type of running, then I'd probably be willing to pay just for that feature.

Hiding the "friends only" leaderboard seems like a bad idea on their part. That feature definitely drove engagement and friendly rivalries. It's not the same if it's only amongst your paid subscriber friends, which is not many.

I appreciate them doing more to get users to pay. I've never paid for Strava, despite having been a very active user in the past. I generally like them as a network, and wouldn't want them to go away.

The immediately breaking API changes are pretty bad. I wonder what the impetus was behind that move. Too complicated to have it act as a transition? Maybe they could have announced these changes, but have them start in 30 days, with a small discount for users if you subscribe before then.

Why don't you use something like gpx logger ?

The route builder has improved a great deal in recent times; they leverage the data they have to pick common routes for runners/riders. Have discovered several interesting places to run locally that I wasn't aware of, and its also fantastic for planning a commute (i.e. bike riders tend to on aggregate, avoid dangerous/unfriendly routes, so the planner ends up doing so as well).

I totally understand wanting to push more people to subscriptions, honestly I find it a way more user friendly model than selling data, or doing other weird behind the scenes stuff. If you like this, pay us for it, and we'll keep making it.

Shutting down an API makes sense of course - I mean an API doesn't come for free - someone has to maintain it, upgrade it, etc, but I just hate it. More walled gardens and data that I can't really move around in real time (yes, I know you can export data, and I know entire apps like rungap can move everything around everywhere)

But god what I wouldn't give for an alternate world where so many of these things are open-source software that only needs to generate enough revenue to pay for some salaries (and not pay back 17 rounds of VCs) and have open APIs.

[Thinking right now specifically about Home Assistant. In my mind it's far better than any proprietary home automation platform, now that there's enough revenue to even pay a few devs to work on it full time, it's rapidly getting UX improvements that make it better even for non-developers to use, it's completely open, etc etc etc]

They are already selling your data, whether you pay or not. Not in some evil way though[1], but their free customers are very valuable to them. So this decision to strip a core feature, only differentiating feature, is really mind-boggling.

1. https://metro.strava.com/

Over the past 5 years, Strava has aquired the reputation of not fixing any bugs and not adding any useful features. Instead there was just a little bit of churn in the UI, annoying most users. A better way forward might have been to keep existing features for everyone, but add a number of useful new features for paying subscribers.

I can attest to this. A HealthKit duplication bug (all your rides got duplicated in Apple Health app) was lingering with Strava for over 2 years. A large group of people interacted with their support/engineering to fix it, nothing came out of it, people left.

I would be happy to subscribe if Strava would just add support for triathlon activities. They've been promising that literally for years with zero progress.

To be fair on Strava, they have made some effort to addressing this over the last few months:

https://www.strava.com/subscription/whats-new

But now it's kinda obvious they only did this as ammo in preparation for today's announcement. I sincerely do hope they continue to add new features, there is a huge stack of requests and ideas still waiting in their support forums.

No, they did it because they lost entire years following ill-advised growth fantasies into nonexisting markets where every yoga session, every treadmill workout would somehow be a "Strava moment" and that would magically pay their bills. They completely neglected their incredibly successful (within scope) but not quite profitable core business. A few months ago they switched to salvage mode, going through those years of accumulated backlog at dangerous speed. And now this, it's just a sign of desperation. It certainly shares the cause with the changes before but I wouldn't call one the buildup for the other.

Hands down the best summary of what seems to be going on I've seen.

I vaguely remember new features some 5+ years ago, or promises of fixing issues (that are still there), but that had stopped and all we got was a social-network-like feed. One would think with the data they have Metro would be able to profit from free users, but I guess not?

> A better way forward might have been to keep existing features for everyone, but add a number of useful new features for paying subscribers.

I completely agree here. I think removing features to paid will always leave many users upset.

If you don't have a good monetization plan from the beginning, then I think the safer approach is to put new features under paid and make that the value add.

But making your product worse, and making users pay to just get back to what it was? ugh.

Also I think this will hurt them more than the expect, as they kind of are a social media platform and removing the free 'social' part will drive away a lot of users that might have considered paying at some point.

This is a great example of why it’s important to charge money for things up front, rather than later on. If they’d charged for these features from day 1, this could have been a glowing article about how their revenue model has helped them support feature development and build a third-party app ecosystem. They should have charged for it sooner.

But i don’t think they’d be as popular without being free. I have a Garmin watch which has an app, iPhone has fitness tracking built in. Nike has a free app. The list of competitors goes on and on.

Now that they have network effects and switching costs (all my historical data), time to squeeze and monetize.

Given the nearly universally hostile comments about “squeeze and monetize”, I wonder if that approach is finally winding down. Sure would be amazing if YC refused to fund anyone who didn’t charge money from day one. “If your idea isn’t worth charging for, it isn’t worth funding for.”

That would not match the growth model that investors seem to want to see (or be fooled by). If you can't show massive adoption up front in concept, how do you choose which to invest in unless you're in it for the long haul? Which seems to be out of fashion...

Either investing is a game of skill, or it’s a game of chance.

If it’s like poker, taking away the ability to see one card from everyone’s hand doesn’t mean you automatically will lose the game. It just means you’ll be slightly less likely to win due to a lost advantage. Your break even may require an additional investment, in exchange for not making people feel ripped off.

If it’s a game of chance, adoption is completely irrelevant :)

> switching costs (all my historical data)

You can use Tapiriik[0] to sync your Strava data with other services, including exporting them to a Dropbox folder. At least I think it will still work after this.

[0] https://tapiriik.com/

You can easily export all the raw data (fit/gpx files) directly from the Strava website, without giving access to any 3rd party.

As a non-competitive runner Strava has two value propositions for me: find routes, and share my updates.

Neither of these should ever have been free because now I will jump ship before I will pay for them.

I don't much care about these changes one way or another, but it would be very sad if they went away. For better or worse, they created far and away the best fitness platform for cyclists, if only because of the mindshare and network effects. Their analyses are also quite good. It would be a real pity if they went away, and I hope they stay solvent.

I've been a paying subscriber since I first joined in Aug 2018 and am happy to support it.

As a cyclist and DAU I haven’t been a paying user for the past few years. Just subscribed today. This application costs a lot to run and it’s been mostly ads-free unlike Instagram. Pay if you can. Nothing comes free.

Strava does pretty well as a social network. But their analytics are generally weaker than TrainingPeaks or Garmin Connect.

I hope this at least solves the people 'gps bombing' certain popular segments with fake times. I use all three of those apps you mentioned and generally here is how I frame them:

TrainingPeaks - analytics, record keeping, tracking improvement, interacting with my running coach, planning build up to events, making notes to self about training. (Training and planning)

Garmin Connect - where I record, check data, and handle posting. Since buying a watch, four button clicks on my wrist has music playing and my scheduled workout timed out and just beeps at me when I need to speed up / slowdown. It probably gets me out the door 5 minutes faster than using my phone and strava which isn't nothing (Tracking).

Strava - fun way for me to interact with others. Minimal useful information, unless I'm being silly competitive against myself or others. (read: social)

It takes zero effort to have Garmin and my watch sync with both TP and GC, while if I record on Strava on my phone I have to download a file and upload it to the other two. the GC push to strava has significantly reduced my engagement with strava from once a day to once or twice a week where I bulk comment / thumbs up others workouts. If I didn't have running friends who were in other states or training peaks had social elements I would probably slowly fade to zero usage on Strava.

Many of the popular Strava segments are a total joke, full of obvious fakes or mistakes. They claim to automatically flag suspicious activities but I still see so many that can't possibly be correct. I doubt Strava is even using any ML technology to catch those.

You don't even need ML for that - if someone ran a segment twice as fast as the olympic record for that distance, it's pretty obviously wrong... And yet, that happens pretty regularly for segments I look at.

I'm a long time Strava user, I have a four digit user id. Except for the year I won a free subscription for a year, I've always paid for the service. I'm a data nerd and cyclist.

This change in Strava's policy makes me very sad because it's clear they are managing it poorly and Strava might die as a result.

Who could step in to fill the void? Garmin? No, they're just terrible at anything other than collecting raw GPS data and it's clear they don't have athletes in mind when creating features. Even when they have winning products they find ways to sabotage them. Garmin Connect is full of potential, yet fails to engage users or become a social platform.

I kinda hope Veloviewer.com steps up to fill the void. It's all about data.

I'm a four digit user id as well and have been paying since they first offered it.

While I plan to stick it out with Strava, I'd also like to explore any new apps out there that might take its place. Got any ideas of other apps out there?

I think the route builder is better in https://ridewithgps.com/ - and it seems to work better with my Wahoo Elemnt Bolt

There was a topic/thread in the Strava support forum about routes exported from Strava to Wahoo Elemnt missing all turn directions (for both paying and free users). The thread kept going for years with over 1000 responses. Every one of them said "I need turn directions, it works for Garmin but not Wahoo, please fix". Strava ignored it completely, no response.

Yeah, that's exactly what I noticed. I mean I could make do with it because I could switch it over to the map to see, but it's kind of nice to not have to do that.

Also, went on a long ride which ended up longer 10 days ago because the Strava one routed me onto some motorcycle trails on my gravel bike. I should have double checked, and I got to see a lava cave, so it was all good, but I'm going to stick with Ride With GPS for now.

As a long time Strava it's obvious they have a tiny engineering team. They do a good job of keeping the lights on but have little ability to ship new features other than paid partner integrations.

Strava integration with apple watch and apple health is so poor I stopped using it directly, relying instead of stuff like health fit. Having tried Summit I honestly don't understand why anyone would pay for such a lackluster experience especially for swimming.

If the Activity app would allow for a bit more detailed workout sharing and basic social like likes and comments I'd be done with it entirely.

I use apple watch activity and import to strava just fine. I only started a few weeks ago though so maybe it's improved since you've used it?

> Strava integration with apple watch and apple health is so poor I stopped using it directly, relying instead of stuff like health fit.

Heh Strava gave me so much trouble when I switched Apple Watches. I think I had to delete and reinstall the app a couple of times before the app realised that I was using a different Apple Watch, and offered to pair with a new one.

https://www.cultofmac.com/682215/healthfit-update-sync-apple...

healthfit is great.

This is pretty disappointing. Recently Strava seemed to be turning the corner, releasing new features that users wanted.

Totally understand their need to make money, seeing that they've raised 5 rounds from VC.

However, burning goodwill like this is super counterproductive. After all, most of my riding is on Zwift, I could also switch to Garmin, etc.

I think this is fair. Strava summit is a cheap subscription, and running a very cheap sport to participate in. Segments in my experience appeal to spreadsheet heads who get a kick out of meaningless drilling down into data[0]. I imagine most casual runners are not that.

In many ways I can see this making Strava more appealing to casual runners, as for people starting out on a fitness journey, the last thing you want to see is how much slower you are than other people.

0: https://twitter.com/stravawankers

Afaik Strava is more used by cyclists which is a more expensive sport. Everyone who is sort of serious uses it.

Here in the UK at least it's very popular with the running community, although I remember a few years ago it was definitely cycling-first. Would be interesting to know what the breakdown is by activities, users' primary activity type.

I can't give you that stat but there are some great numbers showing a trend away from single-sport users at https://blog.strava.com/press/strava-releases-2019-year-in-s... (download the zipped report at the top)

Same with the USA. “If it’s not on a Strava, it doesn’t count.”

it definitely started out cycling-focused, and i'd say a higher portion of cyclists use strava. but i'd be willing to bet there are more runners than cyclists using it as an absolute number - the running market is huge compared to just about any other sport, so even a relatively small portion of runners can account for more users than every single sort-of-serious cyclist.

Interesting take, and it does track with my experience as a data nerd. Also, my first time looking at myself on the leaderboards was throughly depressing

Leaderboards in popular areas are likely to be depressing. I've found some joy in tracking down Strava (cycling) segments in more out-of-the-way places and trying to post good times there. On one occasion I drove 90 minutes to the start of a 1-hour segment just to ride it and get the KOM.

I got KOM on a traffic circle in Brooklyn. I've never leaned my bike over so far in my life, it was very fun.

A few weeks later someone beat my time with an average speed of 120mph. Guess they didn't have a WAAS-enabled GPS.

You can flag that 120mph ride and it will be removed. At least Strava responds to flag requests.

Cycling on the other hand - an activity I really enjoy - can get suuuper expensive.

I enjoyed challenging my friends to Strava segments, even if I was mostly slower than any of them.

I was a Strava premium subscriber until the summit packs came along. It made little sense to maintain 2 of the 3 available subscriptions to get the 50% of features you wanted from each of the training and analysis packs, when you could just go down the road and pay a single fee to training peaks for what turned out to be a better training and a vastly superior analysis experience.

Then Strava ditched the chronological feed (it came back a month or so ago) which made sense only to those for those trying to use it for something other than seeing which of your mates ran this morning. Then came posts, and suddenly your feed was full of quasi-motivational clip art from the bloke you met one time at a park run.

And of course Strava's route planner has fallen behind those offered by Ride with GPS and Komoot, although they seem to have given it a bit of attention lately.

I don't want Strava to die, but they forgot who their customers were and went on a 2 year bender chasing casual users. It was already a big task to convince folks you burned to move their money back, but it's going to be herculean having taken the torch to them again.

Cyclists are going to revolt, everyone wants to beat their friends on their favorite hill. It was one of the features I loved most about the app as I could see myself improving compared to people I have a good reference to.

I'm a "cyclist" who absolutely loves Strava and I couldn't care any less about segments or leaderboards or beating my friends on their favorite hill. I just like to track my bike rides. I know there's a core group of hardcore cyclists who use the app like you do, but I wonder if there isn't a much wider group of people who think it's cool to track their rides and that's it.

I actually just ride to beat segments and get in the top 3 at least. This will take out a huge part of enjoying cycling outdoors for me.

you could just become a paying customer and then you don't have to lose all that enjoyment of cycling outdoors

But nothing has significantly changed for you if you can consistently reach top 3 (top 10 actually)

The biggest loss for me (if I wasn't subscribing) would be the "friends" leaderboard. I'm actually not that much interested in the obvious peer ranking on my home climbs (I already know how strong each of my cycling buddies are), but it's also a bit of a connoisseur feature when traveling (e.g. when it's not 2020): a famous col will have dozens of friends on it and none of them are even close to top 1000. The stories (when, why) are often more interesting than the times, even more so if it's not a famous col by a hidden gem, which then becomes a bit of an asynchronously shared experience.

Same. I used Strava for many years but switched to TrainingPeaks. It has a very web 1.0 feel, which leads me to believe they're actually profitable ;)

But there's plenty of alternatives if all you want is to track your bike rides. Training Peaks, Endomondo, Garmin connect, Polar Flow, Runkeeper, Apple Health, Google Fit, RideWithGPS. There's probably a lot more I've forgotten. Strava is giving up on one of their best unique features and will be pretty much the same as everyone else in a crowded segment.

There's so much more they could do to improve the service instead, but then they haven't shown any interest in development for years. I guess this is the easiest way for a desperate management to try to squeeze some more money from the users fast. It's not a good sign for Strava users, even if they don't use the features.

To me segments and leaderboards are largely what have made Strava stand out. Take those away and I might not have much reason to prefer Strava to Garmin Connect or any number of similar apps.

You and others here are responding to this by noting that segments and leaderboards are their one defining, irreplaceable feature, which seems like a pretty strong case for charging for it :)

The concern is that the pool of users on the leaderboard will shrink so much that it will end up becoming meaningless for those paid users who stuck around.

Given what you just said, isn't it logical that Strava would want to monetize that?

You lose the whole network/community effect. I'm not going to pay $60 a year to stick it to my mate who can't stick it back to me when he beats my record. It's their one feature that sets them apart from the rest and they just killed it.

This is the same thought I'm having. I've been using Strava for ~8 years now, and as a MTBer the leaderboards have always been a lot of fun. I would happily pay for the subscription to keep access to the leaderboards, but I'm afraid they'll become a shell of what they were - and that I'll mostly be competing against myself on segments!

Strava's co-founders, who recently returned to run the company, sent a fairly transparent email to users about the changes. The rationale is clear: Strava needs to achieve profitability. They've been around for over 10 years and have completed 6 rounds of fundraising. They see three paths to profitability: 1) ads, 2) sell user data, 3) subscriptions. They're all in on option #3.

The biggest challenge they face with subscriptions, as mentioned by other posters, is that the majority of features that users want are available in the free tier. Most of the subscribers I know (myself included) pay the subscription fee because they want to see the platform survive, not because the subscription tier is dramatically better than free. This model works for non-profits (kind of), but probably doesn't work for a company sitting on $42M in venture funding.

Therefore, they quickly need to a) make the subscription tier much better than free to pull free users over and/or b) pull free tier features behind the paywall. Both are very challenging. If 'a' was easy, you'd think they would have done it years ago. And 'b' is going to risk user churn, which will ultimately erode their network effect. This makes me wonder why they're not considering advertising to free-tier users? Haven't most people accepted the "ad-free for paying users" model?

I think the biggest reason for lack of sympathy from anyone is that the platform was completely stagnant for years. I've been on there as a runner for a long time, and by the time there was any compelling reason to pay, those features had already been done either by browser add-ons or by Runalyze.

Additionally, having built (although never fully launched) an app on their APIs, they never really cared about the developer platform. There's plenty of stories around of their poor treatment of more popular apps.

And lastly, having heard stories from inside, it's just another fun times startup that burned money for fun and very little to show for it.

All valid criticism, but despite the stagnation no one else came along and took the KOM chasing game from Strava. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only solidified their lock on it: races are canceled so people are chasing KOM's instead.

Until people start publicly measuring their accomplishments via another platform, Strava is in good shape from the user loyalty perspective. Now, they need to figure out how to monetize. The risk is sacrificing that user loyalty capital in the pursuit of profit, but either way investors will get closure.

wholeheartedly agree with your general assessment gparticularly the part where you consider yourself more a supporter than a subscriber)

What might be keeping them from going deeper down the advertisement lane: at some point it becomes indistinguishable from selling user data. Sure, with Strava you don't need the adtech panopticon to reach some very specific audiences, but without opting into the panopticon they are cut off from all established online ad procurement processes.

And also there is d) stop being so damn expensive. This alone might make the ad path pointless, it could well be that Strava just happens to be more expensive per user than maximum ad monetization could ever be. If my personal bubble is in any way representative they are already taking in a lot of subscriptions. What we can't know at all is how Strava cost is structured: is it dominated by devs? operations? brand people? Of it's operations then their options are particularly limited and culling personalized leaderboards from free accounts could actually be more about saving expensive queries than about pushing subscriptions.

Well, I started using Strava last week as a free user. Any good alternatives for bikers?

I think Ride With GPS is generally liked.

I'd suggest Strava. Seriously, all those changes are tiny nuances that depending on how you use Strava might never have crossed your path at all.

I'm a paying Strava user and it infuriates me that there is no real alternative.

The website can be slow at times, there's a strange difference in functionality and look and feel between the app and website. AND THEY STILL DO NOT SUPPORT MULTISPORT (brick/triathlon in single activity).

I'd guess segment leaderboards/KOMs/comparison is one of their most popular features - will be interested to see if this increases peoples take up of Summit.

I am a paying member, although don't really see a point in it. Especially since I've noticed that I am using Strava mostly for the social aspect, even if I normally don't care for any of social media stuff. It is really fun to see how my friends, local runners and professional train. For stats I always use Smashrun and Garmin Connect.

well, it was mildly amusing while it lasted.

See you all on ridewithgps where all the brevet cue sheets are cross-posted first anyway.

Another classic inevitable bait-and-switch situation where they offered too much for free to begin with and backtracking on that just seems to make things worse. No one wins.

I like Strava... wanna see them succeed, don’t mind paying for it. That said, I see a bunch of 60 day trial messages... I’m not too clear on what it costs after that?

For what it is worth, Nike Run Club app along with all premium features is now free, at least for a few months while this pandemic is going on

Nike Run Club does something really annoying which is that they keep the GPS locations in their app and there's no way to get it out. They could easily give it back to HealthKit (on iOS at least) like all the other workout apps but they decided to lock people in that way.

As far as I know then you can't use the location on Strava.

I'd been wondering why runs recorded with NRC don't have GPS data in healthkit. That's really disappointing, since I love the app overall. The guided runs with Coach Bennett in particular are great.

Yes, that’s also my main reason to use it. I really like the guided runs too.

My workaround is to remove the HealthKit permissions from NRC and use the iOS Workouts app in parallel. So before the run I start both apps, but only one is writing into HealthKit. It feels a bit silly but it works.

aka how to become the "myspace" of athletes in a year

their whole attraction is segments and leaderboards

maybe the guy who makes stravistix (and maybe also the veloviewer people) can now just make his own data storage and a full replacement service

but someone will

Garmin Connect could win here.

They won't. They are very 'serious' about their API access. You won't get the chance to try it out without a full-blown company behind you.

I've tried to setup a dev account but I was stopped as I had no company homepage and privacy statement. Oh and they call it Garmin Health.

Do you think they would change to accept data from competitor devices? I suppose they could accept the data but make the analysis/experience much worse to make Garmin devices more appealing.

Couchsurfing last week, Strava today... reckoning has arrived?

I switched to Runkeeper 5 years ago. It just works.

What is new here? Many others have done the same.

Their front page tells nearly nothing about the app. Instead, one half of it solicits registration. This tells me all I need to know about their respect to the users.

something something book something something cover

I’m looking at their front page right now and I see “ Connecting the world's athletes” which sounds like a social network for athletes?

Scrolling the tiniest bit but still without changing pages pages, I see “If you're active, Strava was made for you. We're the social network for those who strive” and it shows a map and details of someone’s workout.

That tells me everything I need to know. It’s a social media app to track your workouts and compare them with other people.

The only text the front page displays is "The #1 app for runners and cyclists", on top of a screenshot and registration dividing the screen in two. Might be A/B testing going on.

You're right... the difference is I first checked on mobile (which shows a ton of info). Their desktop site is decidedly more spartan.

However, I would still argue that "The #1 app for runners any cyclists" alongside a picture showing a map and charts with a watch showing time and distance should tell you everything you need to know. It's an app for runners and cyclists that tracks your time and distance. Not exactly the same as "a social network for runners and cyclists" but both statements are correct.

With Strava, you record your workouts (run, bike etc) and it will show you where you went, how far and how fast. Then it finds commonly-run “segments” within your ride, and ranks you on those segments against your friends and the world, so you can see yourself improving over time and compare your speed to others.

> you can see yourself improving over time

I should ask a refund, this feature doesn't work for me! ;-)

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