{"id":90431,"date":"2025-10-20T17:17:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T17:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/90431\/"},"modified":"2025-10-20T17:17:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T17:17:09","slug":"stravas-feud-with-smartwatch-maker-leaves-fitness-fans-in-a-sweat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/90431\/","title":{"rendered":"Strava\u2019s feud with smartwatch maker leaves fitness fans in a sweat"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is a legal dispute that has left athletes fearing for their workout bragging rights. Strava, the fitness app, is suing Garmin, a leading maker of smartwatches and trackers. <\/p>\n

The San Francisco-based Strava is a social network that allows users to let people know about their latest run, walk, cycle or swim. The company has accused Garmin of breaching two of its patents and wants it to withdraw products from sale.<\/p>\n

Garmin hit back, threatening to cut the stream of data from its users to Strava on November 1 unless all its information is branded in the app.<\/p>\n

The clash has forced fitness fanatics to contemplate where to post their workouts should the Garmin-Strava link be broken. Some have characterised it as \u201cmum and dad fighting\u201d.<\/p>\n

But in the two weeks since news emerged of the dispute, Strava has suffered a backlash. When Matt Salazar, Strava\u2019s chief product officer, wrote about the case on the social network Reddit, his post had more than 1,000 comments that were overwhelmingly hostile to his company.<\/p>\n

Some Garmin users took to online forums declaring they would be cancelling their Strava subscriptions.<\/p>\n

Salazar said Strava considered that exercise data belonged to the user and should not have a Garmin logo alongside it, as this would be \u201cblatant advertising\u201d that would be \u201cused to sell more watches\u201d.<\/p>\n

Many considered this hypocrisy. Last year Strava introduced stringent controls on its platform that forced some third-party companies out of business and led to one, Trailforks, deleting 60 million activities from its database. Strava also sought to gag its partners from posting negative comments about the move in online forums.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

The most popular comment under Salazar\u2019s post was: \u201cAs a premium [paid] Strava member I want to be clear that Strava\u2019s only of use to me if it works with Garmin. The moment Strava no longer syncs with Garmin is the last time I open Strava.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aubrey Mvula, who runs the Bigger Than Running YouTube channel, said he felt \u201cpatronised\u201d by Salazar\u2019s post, which he called \u201chighly offensive to intelligent people who understand this stuff\u201d. He highlighted that when he posts a run from Strava on Instagram, it has a Strava logo on it, which he said was \u201cblatant marketing\u201d.<\/p>\n

Mvula said in a video on Facebook: \u201cI don\u2019t even know if you had the legal department, the marketing department at Strava, read over your post. 1,187 comments on your post, all of them negative. It\u2019s a bad sign. All right, I\u2019m off for a run and I\u2019m not even going to post it on Strava. This is staying on Garmin.\u201d<\/p>\n

A poll on a Garmin Facebook forum had 494 votes supporting Garmin and 31 for Strava.<\/p>\n

The real mystery for most observers is why Strava would take on Garmin, as the app is heavily reliant on the data that is sent from athletes\u2019 devices.<\/p>\n

Ray Maker, who runs the DC Rainmaker sports device review site, believes that Strava\u2019s impending stock market flotation<\/a> was the driving force behind the move: securing intellectual property is valued by investors and the lawsuit also attracts publicity.<\/p>\n

However, it\u2019s a high-risk strategy if it leads to Garmin shutting off the connection between its devices and the Strava app.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any debate in the industry that if Garmin shuts off the connection to Strava, Strava is over. I think that would be one of the fastest disappearances from a company standpoint, when you look at Strava\u2019s paying user base being predominantly Garmin users,\u201d Maker said.<\/p>\n

He believes there is a lot of built-up animosity to Strava, which may explain the scale of the backlash, although whether users will actually cancel subscriptions is not clear.<\/p>\n

\u201cStrava has found a way over the last 15 years to piss off people for no obvious reason \u2026 [as a result] they\u2019ve got a lot of people on the internet who are upset at them,\u201d Maker said. He counts himself as a daily Strava user and thinks it\u2019s a \u201cgreat product\u201d.<\/p>\n

In recent days Strava has softened its stance by agreeing to Garmin\u2019s branding requirements, but the legal action is still live. When the dust settles, it may be hard for Garmin to move on as the company is full of long-serving employees. Maker adds: \u201cThese people do not forget \u2026. it\u2019s going to stick with them for a very long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strava has about 50 million monthly active users and is valued at around $2 billion, compared with Garmin\u2019s valuation of $46 billion (\u00a336 billion).<\/p>\n

Strava said in a statement: \u201cUnfortunately, we aren\u2019t able to comment on ongoing disputes. While we don\u2019t agree with the extensive branding Garmin is forcing, uninterrupted connectivity for the subset of our community that uses Garmin remains our top priority, and we have also decided that we will give similar attribution to all of our device partners going forward, to be fair. <\/p>\n

\u201cOur aim is to make branding as unintrusive as possible, and we believe it is the right thing to do in light of the mandatory changes that Garmin is asking all developers to implement by November 1.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is a legal dispute that has left athletes fearing for their workout bragging rights. Strava, the fitness…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[356,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-90431","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-gadgets","8":"tag-gadgets","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}