Strava drops lawsuit against Garmin over alleged patent infringement

Strava has withdrawn its lawsuit against its biggest provider of customers, Garmin, three weeks after alleging patent infringement in relation to its segments and heatmaps.

> Strava demands that Garmin stops selling devices over alleged patent infringement

The original lawsuit claimed that Strava had “suffered damages, including lost revenue and business opportunities, erosion of competitive differentiation and network effects, harm to goodwill, and unjust gains to Garmin.”

Strava app icon in iPhone (credit: Focal Foto on Flickr)

However, a post on Reddit made by Strava’s Chief Product Officer subsequently alleged Garmin were demanding “blatant advertising” on Strava’s website and that Strava considered uploads made to its app to be its users’ data rather than either company. That statement, which attempted to “set the record straight”, was criticised however after it was pointed out that Strava earlier this year started to require its data being explicitly labelled as belonging to Strava when it was uploaded to certain third party apps.

Other third party sites, such as Veloviewer, have already been prevented from receiving shared activity data in what was described as a crackdown on the fitness syncing ecosystem. In other words, data gathered elsewhere could be shared to Strava, but not vice versa.

> Strava CEO says fitness giant plans to go public to make “more and bigger acquisitions”

Sports technology journalist DC Rainmaker, who initially broke the news of Strava’s lawsuit, said the withdrawal was not a surprise as “the fact Strava would even file this case is mindboggling” considering “Garmin has the power to kill Strava stone dead overnight” if it turned off its syncing feature from its devices. He also reported that a Garmin insider had said his company’s response to the lawsuit was “not to blink”, a strategy that appears to have been vindicated. 

Garmin has also become something of an expert in patent law, rarely losing lawsuits and owning more than 1000 patents. In contrast, Strava is reported to have around 20.

Strava Heatmap – Alpe d’Huez (credit: road.cc)

Attention will now turn to Strava’s continuing efforts towards becoming a public company which is courting the attention of major investment banks.  Strava’s CEO declined to give a timescale in an interview with the Financial Times last week for going public but said they wanted “easy access to capital in case we wanted to do more and bigger acquisitions.”

Strava has continued to see a strong growth in its number of raw users and has an estimated 150 million accounts, of whom around one third are monthly active users, and approximately five per cent are paid subscribers.