The Strava IPO and My Desire To Quit the App

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Strava intends to float itself on the stock exchange. In my experience of Twitter, Facebook and other social media apps this is the beginning of the end for the app. In my experience when an app such as Zwift gets VC funding it loses control of its app. Users go from being the customer to investors becoming the client. In this situation user experience degrades continuously.

Years ago, when I was using Zwift, they got VC funding, and within days bluetooth pairing between the speed and cadence sensors and Zwift failed and their solution was "Have you tried turning it off and on again" rather than "Which devices are you using, we’ll see if we can recrate the bug and patch the issue?"

It makes sense that a company like Strava would want to go ahead with an IPO, because it means that instead of waiting for organic growth, it can raise funds and expand much faster. In practice, and in my experience, as demonstrated by the selling of Twitter for an absurd amount, social apps, once they are under VC or investor funding lose their joie de vivre. The app becomes a job rather than a passion project, and with time the user experience degrades.

When Reddit was about to float it did things that angered its community and they moved to free and open source alternatives. When Twitter degraded people flocked to Mastodon, Bluesky, and ironically Facebook owned Threads. (I know people will say Meta, not Facebook, but Meta is just patte blanche)

Connecting on Garmin and Sports Tracker

I would love to connect with people on Garmin Connect but the social features are different. If you want to share your profile via Garmin Connect you need to add someone as a contact, and then invite them. The same is true of the Apple Fitness app. Sports Tracker makes social sharing with a hyperlink much easier.

The Sports Tracker premium plan costs 30 CHF per year, at least when I chose to experiment with it, whereas Garmin Connect and Strava are both around 80 CHF, at the time of writing.

Sports Tracker and Apple Watches

Recently I have noticed that Sports Tracker is pushing to become relevant once again. I have tracked 4400 activities since the 2000s, covering 33,000 kilometres over thousands of hours. Sports tracker has its own tracker app, for activities, but you can also use the Apple’s native workout app and integration is seamless on iOS. Sports Tracker, and the Suunto app are practically the same app, except for the Suunto ingesting data from Suunto and Xiaomi devices seamlessly.

Garmin Connect and Garmin Devices

For the sake of this blog post I did a quick check and I see that plenty of people use either Garmin watches, or garmin cycling devices. Some use Coros, Apple Watches or other but in terms of community, if you dump Strava, then the community, in large part is still in the same place. By this I mean that people are tracking with Garmin devices, and that data is pushed to Strava.

Garmin has groups, but not group events. That’s a niche that Strava has, for now.

Komoot and Map Drawing

I experimented with map drawing, with Strava, and Komoot, and the experience with Komoot is much, much better than with Strava. With Komoot it’s quick and intuitive to do, and it is free. With Strava it is clumsy. If you’re drawing routes, and riding for pleasure, then Komoot is better.

And Finally

If a site like Strava is viable through our financial contributions, then I am moderately happy to pay. I am not happy to pay when VC funding appears, as with Zwift, or IPO conversations are floated. I have seen too many social sites, and Strava is social, ruined by corporate greed, via investors. Twitter was the most glaring example.

With one hundred and fifty million users, and a two point two billion dollar valuation we are only worth fourteen dollars. I am surprised that it is so low. I was expecting it to be more.

And Finally, it is normal for me to subscribe to a product with Apple devices, and then to cancel the subscription a few minutes later. I do this so that when it comes time to renew, I am asked whether I want to, rather than for the renewal to be assumed.