Less than a week after Strava’s lawsuit against Garmin was revealed, it has come to light that Suunto is also suing the company.
Filed in a Texas court on 22 September, Suunto’s case accuses Garmin of infringing five patents related to measuring a user’s respiratory rate, antenna design, watch casing and tracking golf shots.
The complaint alleges that many Garmin smartwatches incorporate the patented technologies without permission, including the Marq, Fenix, Epix, Instinct, Venu and Forerunner models.
Suunto is seeking damages and potentially a permanent injunction to block sales of the Garmin devices that use the features.
Strava’s case against Garmin
Suunto, a Finnish smartwatch and tech company, is not alone in suing Garmin, with its filing appearing soon after Strava’s complaint against the GPS giant.
Like Suunto, Strava is also pursuing legal action against Garmin over patent infringements.
Filed in a Colorado court on 30 September, Strava’s case alleges that Garmin violated the terms of a 2015 agreement between the two companies by offering Garmin-branded segments and leaderboards.
However, Strava’s chief product officer, Matt Salazar, offered a different explanation for the legal action in a Reddit post. He said the primary reason behind Strava’s litigation was a set of “new developer guidelines for all of its API partners”.
Salazar wrote that the dispute arose from Garmin’s new API guidelines announced in July that require “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,” Salazar said.
