The last few weeks have been full of surprises from the world’s biggest training app, Strava.
On October 2, we reported that Strava was suing Garmin over patent infringement, related to Segments and heatmaps. Strava claims in its lawsuit that it has suffered damages, including lost revenue and business opportunities, due to the alleged infringements.
Yet, news of the lawsuit was followed quickly by a Reddit post from Strava’s chief product officer Matt Salazar, putting a new spin on why the company was suing its long-time collaborator.
Salazar said the primary reason behind the litigation was in fact a set of “new developer guidelines for all of its API partners”. According to Salazar, these guidelines would require Strava and other platforms using its API (Application Programming Interface) – which offers developers a data connection between services – to integrate Garmin's logo “on every single activity post, screen, graph, image, sharing card, etc”.
The guidelines will take effect from 1 November. Meanwhile, Salazar’s post has had 1,500 comments and zero upvotes.
When contacted by BikeRadar, Garmin declined to comment on Salazar’s post – and the noise has continued to come from Strava’s side.
An email sent to Strava developers on Friday, 11 October, provided an update to Strava’s own API that says Garmin attribution will be required.
“Activity data obtained through the Strava API may include data that requires attribution to Garmin. Therefore, if your application displays information derived from Garmin-sourced data, you must display attribution to Garmin in the form and manner required by Garmin’s brand guidelines,” the guidelines reportedly state.
On the one hand, this could be read as Strava capitulating to Garmin, despite Salazar’s strong words. But it’s more a case of Strava ensuring that however many of its 150 million athletes that use Garmin smartwatches or bike computers don’t run into issues next month. Losing Garmin’s data would be a big blow.
When asked about the updates to its own API, Strava told BikeRadar that it's unable to comment on ongoing disputes. But a spokesperson said: “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.”
From Strava’s statement, it seems that come next month you won’t only see attribution to Garmin but also other platforms and devices “to be fair”.
The further context to Strava’s decision is its bid to go public in the US. The San Francisco-based company was valued at $2.2 billion last May following a funding round.
Rumours began to circulate last month after Reuters reported that Strava was in discussions with banks about an initial public offering. This made sense considering the value of the company, but also one big hire. In August, Strava announced Matt Anderson as its new chief financial officer, joining from Nextdoor, a social network for neighbourhood communities, which he helped guide through its public listing.
And this week, Strava’s CEO Michael Martin confirmed the app has an “intention to go public at some point” because the move “provides easy access to capital in case we wanted to do more and bigger acquisitions”.
There’s no indication yet of when Strava will join Wall Street, but smoothing things over with Garmin may be a way to stay in the good books of any potential investors.
Whether the lawsuit will continue to go ahead is yet to be seen, but it’s unlikely Salazar will take to Reddit again any time soon.
