Okay. We are rolling. Welcome back to another episode of distance junkie, the official chase to summit podcast. You're probably watching this on YouTube, but if you're not, hello to the audio listeners out there. And if you are watching it on YouTube, go check out the audio version, Spotify, Apple, all the places you get your podcasts.
Dave:So today, we've got a bit of a a rant episode. A lot of people have been asking me about my take on the whole Strava versus Garmin lawsuit that's going on right now. I'm sure you've heard about it. So I just want to take a full episode to sort of catch up with you, talk about what's been going on, and then give you my take on the whole situation, where it might lead, and just my thoughts on it. Just my thoughts.
Dave:Just my opinions. You may have different opinions, and that's what the comments section is for down below. This time of year is absolutely crazy. So apologies. It's been a minute since I published a podcast like this.
Dave:It's Techtober, man. Like, all the new things are coming out. We got new watches. We've got new phones. We've iPhones and action cameras and Apple watches.
Dave:Everything is happening at the same time because it's that time of year. I mean, in just the past few weeks since the last podcast episode, we've got the Suunto race two vertical to, T Rex three Pro, the Polar Loop, the Garmin Phoenix eight Pro. I went to California to see the new Apple watches and iPhone seventeens, the AirPods Pro threes. Garmin came out with their Venue four, an Instinct crossover AMOLED, which I went to New York for. GoPro came out with their new Max two camera.
Dave:The Chorus Apex four came out yesterday, and I put a whole video about that out. So check out the review if you haven't. A lot of things have been going on. And to be honest, I'm a little bit burnt out. It's been like crazy.
Dave:This has been the busiest couple of months I've ever experienced doing this YouTube thing, which is a good thing. Like, no shortage of stuff to talk about, but it also means some other areas of life suffer, you know, less miles out there, hiking and trail running, you know, less time with my kids when I'm traveling and things like that. But the good news is things are starting to settle down a little bit. There's still a lot more coming. There's still new stuff I'm testing in the background, so stay tuned for that.
Dave:In either case, let's get into the topic of this podcast. Strava versus Garmin. The two Goliaths in the, like, fitness tech space. There's more Goliaths like Apple's arguably a bigger Goliath, but these two are very prominent in the space. If you are a runner or cyclist, you probably use Strava.
Dave:I I know a lot of people are anti Strava, but I like the platform. It's like the one social media outlet I feel like is that's healthy for us. You know? Like, we're all on there to give kudos and comment on other activities and check out what cool things the pro athletes are doing. There's a lot of good stuff that comes with Strava.
Dave:Now, Strava is not without its quirks. If you remember, like last year, they had like a major price hike that came out of nowhere where that was kind of weird. It's it's been a weird relationship with Garmin in the past and in how things are done. But now it's all sort of come to a head with this whole lawsuit situation. So if you missed it, let me preface this.
Dave:I am not a lawyer. I'm not a law specialist. I'm just some idiot here on YouTube. So I'm gonna speak about this very broadly in layman layman's terms because I only understand what I understand. But if you wanna get, like, the nitty gritty deep dive on all the details, go check out, Ray over at DC Raymakers video he put out about this because he goes through like the documents and what they mean and it's, complicated.
Dave:Let's let's break it down to my terms in my my layman brain up here. So essentially, Strava has sued Garmin for two patent infringements. One being Strava segments. And if you don't know what Strava segments are, I'll explain them. It's basically a feature that allows you to race against other people, like, virtually.
Dave:So if you're out on a run, you might find a segment on your local trail or something, and you can run that segment and then end up on a leaderboard on Strava. And to be honest, it's a lot of fun. There's, like, course record holders. There's the king of the mountain. It's it's fun.
Dave:It's a good thing to have. It makes people try a little bit harder in certain areas. I'm sure you know what Strava segments are if you're a Strava user, but that's what it is. The other thing involved in this lawsuit is a little bit more complicated, and that is Strava heat maps. Now heat maps, is basically the ability to view popular routes on a map so you can find where other people people are going.
Dave:This is a really useful feature for a variety of situations. For example, if you're traveling and you wanna find, like, a good trail to go hike on that you know is safe and people might be there, you're not gonna be out, like, in the dark alone or something like that. The Strava heat map function allows you to find, like, good known trails, which is it's a great feature to have. Now heat maps is not exclusive to Strava. Like, lots of other companies have done this before, including Garmin.
Dave:But fun fact, these two items, segments and heat maps, are patented by Strava. I don't even know how this patent got through. Like, the process of getting a patent is pretty confusing. You have to apply for it. They investigate to make sure it's like a valid thing you can patent, and then they'll award you the patent if they deem it fit.
Dave:Apparently, in this case, all of those other companies using heat maps kind of flew under the radar because Strava was granted the patent for that as well. In terms of the timeline here, the way this breaks down is pretty crude, but we'll go through it now. So in 02/2013, Garmin introduced their heat maps, which is interesting. This is a this is an interesting fact about the whole situation because Garmin technically did heat maps before Strava did. So Garmin rolled this out in 02/2013.
Dave:I think at that time, was using, like, the original Garmin Fenix, I think. And it was pretty crude implementation at that time, but it was essentially a way to see popular popular routes in your area. Later that year in December 2013, Strava filed for a patent for heat maps. Is that a coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
Dave:Now fast forward in time to 02/2015, Strava and Garmin sort of made a friendship. And this friendship was called an MCA or a master cooperation agreement, I think it's called. Now this agreement basically stated that, Garmin would implement Strava segments on their devices. It was kind of an exciting time when this rolled out. It meant that you could make a segment or race a segment on Strava, but with your Garmin device, and you could see that live segment on your watch, which was pretty cool.
Dave:Now part of this MCA or master cooperation agreement was that Garmin would need to cease development of their own segment platform because Garmin had Garmin segments, which was essentially the same thing as Strava just within Garmin Connect. To be honest, no one uses Garmin segments, including myself. If you go in Garmin segments, it's still there today. You can see a bunch of segments in your area. Like, I I noticed there's a good amount around here, but I've never met anyone that actually uses it.
Dave:The main problem with Garmin Connect, including heat maps and segments is that it's tied to your it's tied to only Garmin users. Where on Strava, it's available for everybody if you have an Apple Watch or a Chorus or Polar or Suunto. So there's a benefit there. In either case, Garmin and Strava were all happy go lucky for a very long time, up until around June 2025. That's when Strava decided to send a notice to Garmin alleging them of patent infringement on heat maps in in their segment platform.
Dave:Now when Garmin didn't respond to those initial two notices that Strava sent them, in September 2025, just last month, Strava filed the full blown lawsuit against Garmin for patent infringement. What makes this whole story even more interesting is that in the background, another requirement from Garmin popped up in the form of updated Garmin API terms. Essentially, what these these new API terms meant is that Garmin is now requiring any third party company or developer accessing Garmin user data to indicate that that data came from a Garmin device. And this was a mandate that's going to be effective in a couple of weeks actually on November 1. This doesn't just affect Strava, it affects any company out there that accesses Garmin data.
Dave:They need to flag that it came from a Garmin device, which in my opinion, it's actually not a big deal. Like, it just means that when you log into Strava and view an activity, you might see a little Garmin logo on that activity, like powered by Garmin or or data supplied by Garmin, something like that. But even with this new mandate, I found this interesting because if we go back a couple of years, Strava already did this with KOROS devices. Like, when KOROS was sort of in its early days, they only had a few watches out there. There was some sort of partnership between Strava and Koros where Strava would show right on the activity data page that said, like, powered by Koros or data supplied by Koros, something like that.
Dave:Now I'm assuming Koros paid for that. It was sort of like a promotion. They probably paid some sort of licensing fee to get their logo on there, but it did happen. So it's not the first time we've seen this. In either case, this whole mandate with the API requiring Strava to show the Garmin logo on activities, frustrated the CEO or CPO, I forget which one, so much that on a on a Reddit post, they chimed in and talked about their frustration with this new mandate, which I think could have added some fuel to the fire when it comes to this whole lawsuit situation.
Dave:Another thing going on in the background with this whole mess is that Strava is actually trying to go public right now. So if you didn't know, Strava is currently a private company, but the CEO publicly announced on like a Forbes or West, Wall Street Journal thing that they plan to go public through an IPO or an initial public offering in the very near future. And the Wall Street Journal even reported that Strava's initial valuation is worth, like, $2,000,000,000 or something like that. Did you realize they were that valuable? And from my understanding, having this lawsuit going on in the background is not great optics for investors that might be interested in Strava going public.
Dave:So it's kind of odd that they chose this time to to do all this while trying to go public. Very interesting. Okay. So let's get to the point of this podcast. What's my theory on why Strava is suing Garmin?
Dave:And I've got a couple that I've I I've heard one of these from a couple of other people, but my other one is a little bit unique. So the first theory I have is that Strava is developing their own hardware. This seems like the most straightforward reason for this lawsuit. So maybe eventually we'll see a Strava watch or wearable that has ex exclusive features that third party hardware or manufacturers can't tap into, and this lawsuit could be the first stepping stone in that direction. We've seen this before with companies like Zwift, for example, that that game that a lot of cyclists use where they didn't make hardware, and then one day there was a Zwift bike in people's houses.
Dave:That could be what we're seeing here. I guess time will tell. But my other theory is something I haven't heard before, and maybe some of you out there are thinking this. I think that Strava might be planning to create some sort of exclusive partnership with another manufacturer. And the first name that comes to mind with that is Corus.
Dave:I know Corus is relatively a small company. They're pretty small potatoes compared to the big dogs like Apple or Garmin, for example. But we do know that Strava and Khoros had a relationship in the past in in the form of displaying that little logo on certain activities. Maybe they intend to expand this further by offering live segments or certain heat map functions to KOROS devices only, or maybe even partnering even closer than that. And maybe KOROS hardware starts falling under the Strava umbrella.
Dave:So instead of making their own watches, they're gonna, like, rebrand KOROS watches, something like that. I don't know. It would be an interesting path to go down. I don't know how that would end, but I just have a hunch that there's more to this than we think. With those conspiracy theories out of the way, what does this mean for you right now?
Dave:For a Garen user who also uses Strava? Nothing. So the lawsuit is ongoing in the background, still being investigated and validated and all that fun stuff. And it's probably gonna take a very long time. So if you are a Garmin user and you do use Strava, I probably wouldn't worry about anything just yet.
Dave:But if we do look at Strava's annual year in sports thing they publish every year from last year, we can see that Garmin and Apple watches were the primary wearable devices that fed the most data to Strava. So I can only imagine that Strava's in a position where they're like, they need Garmin. I mean, if one of your main contributors to all of your data in the main user group of your platform is Garmin users, they kinda need them to comply or they need to work something out because I I could see it being pretty bad for Strava subscriptions and memberships for Garmin users to not be able to sync with Strava. And to be honest, I think this is already hurting them because judging by the comments I've read on Reddit and YouTube comments and stuff like that, it seems like there's people already unsubscribing from Strava just because of this lawsuit. Because it from the outside, it does look kind of silly.
Dave:Like, what's going on here? With that all explained, what could happen? Let's talk hypothetically here. So the first thing, that Strava is requesting, in terms of this lawsuit is that Garmin stops selling their devices. Like any Garmin device with built in segments, which is all of them, will stop being sold.
Dave:Now that seems incredibly unlikely, so I don't think we need to worry about that. The other thing that could happen if Garmin decides to, like, settle and comply with this whole thing is they could just remove the features from their devices. That also seems extremely unlikely because heat maps, like I said, like, Garmin was doing that first. Not only that, it's very valuable, and I feel like a lot of users actually use that feature. So why would they drop that?
Dave:Now when it comes to segments, that argument could be made. Garmin could decide, you know what? It's not worth our time. We'll throw you a bone. We'll remove segments, and we'll just move on from there.
Dave:And I don't think a lot of people would care because, again, not many people use Garmin segments anyways. Another thing that could happen with this is that eventually they could just break ties. And maybe at that point, your Garmin watch will no longer sync with Strava. That feels unlikely, and maybe there would be a workaround or maybe you'd have to manually upload your GPX file to do it, which feels kind of old school at this point, but, it's a possibility. Another possibility is that this ends in some sort of licensing deal where Garmin has to pay Strava a certain amount of money every year to continue using, you know, live segments in the heat map function.
Dave:I don't know if they'd be down for that, but maybe to get this whole thing over with, they would consider it. And finally, and probably the most likely thing I think will happen as an outcome here is that the whole lawsuit will get dismissed and dropped after there's further investigation and the governing bodies here decide that it's probably not worth going through the process of an entire, you know, courtroom situation. At the end of the day, though, this is a really interesting topic, and it's it's kinda baffles me that it's all going on and and that Strava started it because I feel like Strava needs Garmin more than Garmin needs Strava. I know other people have said that, but it's kinda true. The Garmin feeds the most data to them.
Dave:Why is this happening? In either case, those are my ramblings on the topic. I wanna hear from you in the comments down below. I wanna I wanna know your take on this. Where you think it might go?
Dave:Will it affect us? Comment down below, or if you can do that on podcasts, do that too. Make sure to follow the audio only version of this podcast if you haven't done that yet. Check out the merch store over at chasethesummit.com where you can pick up, hang on, a sweet hat like that. Yep.
Dave:Shameless plug. Also, make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel so you don't miss lots of upcoming content. And I think that's it for this one. Not a super long podcast, but I wanted to get this out there, share my thoughts, and get your thoughts on this topic. Okay.
Dave:Hope you liked it. I'll see you very soon. Bye.