For users, Strava’s lawsuit against GPS giant Garmin may be the strangest running-industry legal battle since the Brooklyn Half Marathon sued the Brooklyn Half last year. Now, a Strava executive has shed light on the feud and why the lawsuit exists.
In a Reddit post, Strava’s chief product officer, Matt Salazar, revealed that Garmin is requiring the social fitness app to display the Garmin logo on every workout uploaded by a Garmin user. Salazar said Strava is actively fighting to block this for two main reasons:
1) Strava considers it blatant advertising
“These new guidelines actively degrade Strava user experience (and the other 150M+ athletes). We already provide attribution for every data partner, but Garmin wants to use Strava and every other partner as an advertising platform,” writes Salazar.
Strava refuses to turn user data into its ad space, even if it means losing Garmin uploads.
2) Keeping your data in your hands
“If you recorded an activity on your watch, we think that is your data. We believe you should be able to freely transfer or upload that data without requiring logos to be displayed alongside it or have that data be used as an advertisement to sell more watches,” Salazar adds.
The history
On July 1, Garmin announced new developer guidelines for all of its API partners, including Strava, that required the Garmin logo to be present on every activity post, screen, graph, image and sharing card. If you’re wondering what an is API partner, it’s basically an invisible handshake that lets two apps function with each other.
Salazar reported that Garmin gave Strava until Nov. 1 to comply with the demands, and if not, Garmin threatened to cut off access to their API, stopping all Garmin activities from being uploaded to Strava.
“Unfortunately, we could not justify to our users complying with the new guidelines,” said Salazar. “As such, we have tried to resolve this situation with Garmin over the course of the past five months, including proposing additional attribution across the platform in a less intrusive way, but it did not work.”
The lawsuit
On Sept. 30, Strava filed a lawsuit against Garmin in Colorado federal court, accusing the watch and bike-computer giant of infringing patents related to segments and heatmaps from a decade ago.
Strava alleges Garmin violated a 2015 Master Cooperation Agreement, the deal that introduced Strava’s live segments to Garmin devices, by studying Strava’s technology and expanding Garmin-branded segments beyond what the contract allowed.
Garmin has declined to comment beyond a standard statement saying the company does not discuss pending litigation. According to fitness-tech guru DC Rainmaker, the company is expected to challenge the validity of Strava’s patents. A potential flashpoint: Garmin offered heatmap-style features as early as 2013, a year before Strava filed its patent applications in 2014.
Strava’s lawsuit appears to be a strategic move to pressure Garmin into dropping its data and advertising demands, while shifting focus onto a longstanding patent dispute.
If the case advances in court, Strava’s claims could affect most of Garmin’s current lineup, including Forerunner, Fenix, and Epix watches, as well as Edge cycling computers.
