Ever since Strava sued Garmin in early October users of both brands have been waiting anxiously to see if their relationship would break down entirely, which could lead to Garmin activities not being uploaded to the Strava app.
But the latest comments from Strava suggest you can lay those fears to rest. Even if the legal dispute regarding Strava’s claims of patent infringement by Garmin is set to rumble on, there doesn’t seem to be an immediate risk to the two brands severing ties.
That’s because Strava has backed down on another issue, which is Garmin’s demand for more extensive attribution when third-party apps use data collected by a Garmin device.
Essentially, Garmin wants its logo used on every post created using its data, and Strava didn’t want to do that.
This seems to be a partial motivator for the dispute, because on the day Strava sued Garmin its Chief Product Officer Matt Salazar posted on Reddit complaining about this issue. If this post was meant to garner sympathy, it did not go as planned — so far it has zero upvotes and 1.4k downvotes, with many comments accusing Strava of hypocrisy on the issue.
What has Strava said?
On October 11, Gadgets & Wearables reported that Strava had emailed its developers saying apps using data from Garmin devices via the Strava API will have to follow Garmin’s branding requirements from November 1.
A statement given to TechRadar confirms that Strava will be adopting Garmin’s new guidelines:
"While we don’t 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.
"Our 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 1st."
What happens now?
Strava’s top priority is uninterrupted connectivity with Garmin.
It looks like all Strava data will now show more attribution to the device the data was collected from, whether it's a Garmin watch or otherwise, but perhaps the key line in the statement says Strava’s top priority is uninterrupted connectivity with Garmin.
Garmin is the biggest brand in sports watches, and there’s no doubt that a substantial chunk of Strava uploads come from Garmin devices. If Garmin shut off the connection because of the legal dispute, it’s likely that Strava would suffer most — users are more likely to swap to another social fitness app than buy an entirely new sports watch to connect with Strava.
With the attribution issue seemingly settled, it’s interesting to see if the patent dispute is quietly shelved as well at some point in the future. Either way, if you use one of the best Garmin watches and upload your data to Strava, it seems safe to say you’ll be able to keep doing just that for the foreseeable future.
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