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Strava abruptly ends 3rd party data sync to Apple Health
- whimsicalism 5y agoSad to see this happen to Apple, a strong crusader for open standards across competing systems.
- outside1234 5y agoamen
- CoastalCoder 5y agoHonest question, is that comment meant at face value, or is it sarcastic? My impression of Apple has been that it's a mixed-bag for privacy, etc., so I'm actually not sure.
- whimsicalism 5y agoSarcastic :) (but hopefully not snarky?) For privacy, certainly they have been a crusader. For open standards, considerably less so.
- dc-programmer 5y agoApple’s garden (orchard?) is famously walled. This just means they intentionally make their hardware incompatible with other hardware/software. Presumable so you have to buy more Apple stuff
- Gigachad 5y agoApple Health is not a walled product though. Any 3rd party app can pull and push data.
- asdff 5y agoNot really the case for their computers imo. OS X is like a linux distro but with paid maintainers.
- whimsicalism 5y agoTry getting Siri to use google maps :)
- asdff 5y agoI consider Siri like some mold from iOS that has spread and polluted OSX, rather than a fundamental part of OSX.
- dc-programmer 5y agoIt’s more of an aspirational wall. If they could get away with it, 3rd party software on the Mac would go the way of the headphone jack
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mdoms 5y agoGarmin Connect is so much better than Strava it's not even close. The only reason I could possibly imagine preferring Strava is if I desperately need my social circle to be aware of my every workout. For those of us who do this for ourselves and not the approval of our peers Strava is miles behind.
- adam-_- 5y agoMaybe it’s just what you know but every time I’ve used Garmin Connect it’s felt like a dumpster fire compared to Strava. Even for route planning (years ago) which I would not say Strava is fantastic at, it still seemed worse. YMMV
- asdff 5y agoAre any apps at all actually good for route planning especially on a bike? It seems like that this is something in software that just sucks. I don't even bother anymore, I open up a topographical map and figure out routes by hand. No more turning left across six lanes from a stop sign. No more route thats "mostly flat", aside from the 400ft of undulating terrain that saps you. No sharing the road with semitrucks that go 50mph and are actively trying to force you off and into riding on the sidewalk. No more surprises. All this planning turns things into a homework assignment, but its worth the investment for points of interest you regularly are going to.
- hondo77 5y ago> Are any apps at all actually good for route planning especially on a bike? No. Google Maps directions for bikes is a good start but you have to take the routes with a big grain of salt (even with that Google is still better than every other app I've tried). I street view the route to make sure there's a least a good shoulder and re-route appropriately.
- InCityDreams 5y agokomoot.com Used by ultra-racers to plan multi-day events. My only problem is, that when I select 'road ride', it tries to get me on a bike path. That would be a good thing for some people.
- trentgreene 5y agoI’ve rearchitected my data flow for cycling multiple times now, and it’s frustrating to do it again
- bjorn2k 5y agoWhat is the most important data (or strava features) you want to keep? I was actually looking into this myself, and a few parts of strava are not that hard. For me the overview of my rides (including avg speed and distance is important), I quickly implemented a webpage with javascript and leaflet (map viewer), and I could present that data pretty quickly using geojson. I had an offline program which converted gpx traces to geojson, but I'm pretty sure I'm able to read gpx in javascript directly. The harder part is generating the gpx trace (which I used komoot app for), as this involves matching your trace (gps positions) on a map instead of using the data as is.
- exabrial 5y agoAll of the (Garmin, Strava, Apple, and Google [who is trying really hard but failing]) want a monopoly on your health data. Garmin is the only one I actually trust currently, as they've shown 0 willingness to monetize your health information. The Strava/Garmin relationship is an interesting one: Strava has the social network, Garmin has the best devices [for serious Athletes, not casual users]. Garmin Connect is pretty cool in it's own right, but the Social features never really took off, which is where Strava plays and has a de-fact monopoly. Strava can't survive without Garmin, and Garmin benefits from Strava's content. Garmin has pulled some 'power moves' in the past though with people it doesn't like... A competitor: Wahoo, who made cycling GPS computers, was cut off from inserting data into Garmin Connect and it left a lot of users out in the cold. Most serious cyclists will use Garmin devices, not an Apple watch, to track their rides as it seamlessly integrates with ANT+ sensors: power, cadence, wheel speed, heart rate, chainring and cog positions sensors. Interesting to see Strava cut off Apple... I'm guessing it has to do something with preventing them from developing an alternative to the Strava social network.
- oneplane 5y agoStrava isn't cut off from Apple. Instead, Garmin/Fitbit etc. would send their data to Strava, which then would forward it to Apple for them. The part where Strava takes the data from non-Strava apps is the one that got disabled (presumably by strava and not by garmin, but either could have).
- usrusr 5y agoReally surprising to see Strava actively avoiding the central switchboard role that would be such a powerful retention feature. I wouldn't be surprised to see it come back very soon, with some low level UX polisher receiving that talk about power and responsibility.
- sulam 5y agoGarmin couldn't directly disable this, once Strava has your data they can do with it whatever they want, licensing permitting. Which is a segue into - while I have no specific knowledge of this case, I do think it's somewhat tricky to take data from a third party and then hand it on to another third party. Presumably all of this was mediated by the user, and user's desires should be paramount here, but it's an example of why I believe OAuth is fairly broken and what we should all be giving permission to is capabilities, not access.
- samschooler 5y agoNote: this restriction is limited to THIRD PARTY data, so: Strava -> Apple Health, still works Garmin/Fitbod/3rd party app -> Strava -> Apple Health, no longer syncs. IMHO this is better for me because now I don’t have duplicates in Apple Health and can sync to both services. But to each they’re own I guess.
- Gigachad 5y agoI think this can make sense. The recording devices ideally should have their own integrations with Apple Health so the source pushes to all the data repos rather than repos chaining the data along.
- artdigital 5y agoWonder if this includes third party sensor data that’s tracked with Strava. Like if I use a chest strap and record into Strava, will the exported data include the sensor data or is that considered “third party”
- stingrae 5y agoWhy not let users chose to enable/disable?
- micromacrofoot 5y agoyeah strava (understandably) wants to upsell you on premium features in the app, they don’t just want to be some middleman for your Garmin app
- Gigachad 5y agoI wonder what is going on at Strava. It feels like peak Strava was some time around 2018. Since then, it seems like features have only been getting disabled, hidden behind opt in flags, or moved to the paid plans. I completely understand the decision to move things to paid since their service does cost a lot to run and the subscription isn't expensive, but where are all the new and cool features that should have come out over the last few years? And I wonder if the article is correct in that they are pivoting away from segments. That seems strange since segments seem like the most compelling feature.
- usrusr 5y ago> And I wonder if the article is correct in that they are pivoting away from segments That's not what DCR wrote, that part was clearly about user perception: Strava has grown into something bigger than just that app that declares you KOM when you go really fast.
- thi2 5y agoStarted using it in 2019 and it only got worse, it's a shame because I really enjoy the social aspect of it since it bundles a lot of sport and gear into one place but with this trend I feel like the users will be leaving.
- outside1234 5y agoThere is no business here that scales sadly. In fact, it gets more expensive for Strava to operate the longer you are a subscriber And it apparently isn't valuable enough to charge more for ($5/month)
- KindAndFriendly 5y ago>> it gets more expensive for Strava to operate the longer you are a subscriber What are you referring to? That Strava has to store&compute more and more data from a user the longer they are using the platform?
- outside1234 5y ago
- notacoward 5y agoThe weird thing is that they claim it's to avoid duplicate activities, but they totally know how to recognize duplicates already. Every so often, there's some sort of glitch in one of my activities getting from Garmin to Strava. If I'm feeling impatient, I download the .fit file from Garmin and upload it to Strava myself, and I never get a duplicate that way. Happened for the first time in a while just last week. Clearly, whenever Garmin does send the data, Strava is perfectly capable of recognizing an activity it already has, and it does the right thing. I'm just not buying that excuse. BTW and a bit OT, I find it very impressive that Strava can retroactively create a leaderboard going back years for a newly created segment, meaning that they must evaluate potentially millions of nearby activities for overlaps, often in just a few minutes. That's a hell of a query. Anybody know of more information on how they do it?
- mulmen 5y agoMillions of activities is approximately zero activities. That's an inconsequential amount of data. Even if it is a couple orders of magnitude larger than I think geographic partitioning can keep the volume small enough to easily fit in RAM.
- mdoms 5y agoIncredibly ignorant statement. An activity can have thousands of data points across dozens of metrics. A record of your route to 1 meter or smaller precision for a 5 hour bike ride is alone thousands of data points. Along with hundreds or thousands of time series points for heart rate, elevation, cadence, power, respiration, etc etc... Millions of activities means tracking tens of billions of data points and perhaps an order of magnitude more than that.
- mulmen 5y agoThere’s no reason all that granular data would be used to calculate a leaderboard. It can be rolled up in advance and for leaderboard purposes most of it can be ignored. Parallelism along the location, customer and activity dimensions makes this an easily reducible problem.
- saos 5y agowhat the heck?
- ijustwanttovote 5y agoI kept messing with my settings yesterday to figure out why my Strava data wasn't exporting to Apple health. Now I know why, I must've spent an hour trying to get it to work.
- datavirtue 5y agoInstead of fixing shit like the issues pointed out in this post, they spent all their resources fucking up the UX in the app. The new activity save screen is complicated and is very obscure about where the various form data are going to show up in the final post. It used to be intuitive and straight forward. Feels like they were trying to be clever.
- voigt 5y agoIs there any OSS/self hosted alternative to Strava? Where would be the challenges?
- Gigachad 5y agoI actually spent a lot of time working on one. As usual there isn't a whole lot of special sauce that makes it impossible but its an immense amount to replicate all of the features as well as a rather expensive to run piece of software if you want something like segments and high score boards. And after all this, your user base consists of the people who didn't want to pay for strava.
- asdfadfas 5y agoI built one for myself, sqlite + apache superset. I basically did that because over the years I had switched devices from different companies and I used to use endomondo which was shut down. I wanted to have all my data in once place. It does require me to export data from device and use my import script once a while, however works for me.
- xsmasher 5y agoStrava has: * the database of "segments" created by users * the leaderboard data for each segment * the network-effects of being "the place to record data" If you create a self-hosted Strava then it isn't really Strava; it's just a log of your workouts.
- johannes1234321 5y agoAlso the heatmqps to do routing based on where people actually are riding. Which is useful to identify the good/secure roads. But a self hosted tool still can do a lot for own analysis. For tracking the own progress, the own training plan.
- prmoustache 5y agoWell not exactly turn key solution but you can do a lot with a self hosted elasticstack instance. I guess you might be able to do interesting dashboards with grafana.
- rufius 5y agoGuess I’m cancelling my Strava subscription.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Angostura 5y agoI'd never use Strava as my aggregator. I pipe all my Activity into Apple Health and then push the ones I want to be on Strava from there. It seems that Strava agrees with me - which is a bit odd.
- dustingetz 5y agopaid version just gets more and more complicated, all i want is to know how many days per week and miles per week i ran with my times trending up or down, but all the easy to use screens have been removed and replaced by designer mush. it’s like KPIs have gone wrong and they think the rage navigating is engagement. app was fine in like 2017. and then when they make me swipe through some product tour of overcomplicated BS or hunt for the concealed “close ad” button on some stupid year end recap when all i want to do is start my run. i think they have too many PMs competing on vanity metrics to justify their existence