Hilarious double standards, Strava
Strava is suing Garmin for… stuff:
Strava has sued Garmin, an act that I very much did not have on my bingo card for 2025. In doing so, they are demanding that Garmin cease selling effectively all of their fitness/outdoor watches, as well as cycling computers. Additionally, they’re asking for a bunch of feature removals on Garmin Connect.
Just business stuff in preparing for their upcoming IPO, right?
OK, but in what can only be described as an all time PR blunder, their Chief Product Officer took to reddit to "set the record straight":
Hi r/Strava, it’s Matt Salazar here - Strava’s Chief Product Officer. As you have seen, we’ve recently taken some action against Garmin. I wanted to post on here to share some background on why we did this and the situation with Garmin.
On July 1st, Garmin announced new developer guidelines for all of its API partners, including Strava, that required the Garmin logo to be present on every single activity post, screen, graph, image, sharing card etc. We have until November 1st to comply, and if not, Garmin has threatened to cut off access to their API, stopping all Garmin activities from being uploaded to Strava.
We are actively trying to prevent this from happening for two reasons:
- We consider this blatant advertising. These new guidelines actively degrade your user experience on Strava (and the other 150M+ athletes). We already provide attribution for every data partner, but Garmin wants to use Strava and every other partner as an advertising platform - they told us they care more about their marketing than your user experience. Garmin doesn’t even provide data attribution for 3rd party devices (such as heart-rate monitors or power meters) on the Garmin Connect app.
- We consider this to be YOUR data. If you recorded an activity on your watch, we think that is your data. We believe you should be able to freely transfer or upload that data without requiring logos to be displayed alongside it or have that data be used as an advertisement to sell more watches.
Unfortunately we could not justify to our users complying with the new guidelines. As such, we have tried to resolve this situation with Garmin over the course of the past five months, including proposing additional attribution across the platform in a less intrusive way, but to no avail.
We know we have a lot of Garmin users on Strava as well as r/Strava and so wanted to be clear with everyone as to the current situation and what we’re trying to do to resolve it.
This coming from the company that just last year decidedly showed (was the kick in the butt I needed to finally get around to putting together my workout log so I guess it all ended up for the best, for me) that they in fact do not consider your data your data. It considers it their data.
The comments in that reddit thread are suggested reading. Absolute gold!