If you are someone who looks very carefully at your Strava feed, then you will have noticed a small but crucial update this week.
At the top of every activity on the 'home' page, the type of device that it was recorded on is now displayed, whether its a Garmin Forerunner 245 (as I use on my runs) or a Wahoo ELEMNT Bolt (as I use on my rides).
The update, which came online at 6pm UK time on Monday, follows the end of Strava's legal action against Garmin; last week, the American fitness tracking company has dropped the lawsuit relating to patent infringement against the American fitness tech giant.
It appeared that Strava was effectively demanding that Garmin ceases selling all devices that contribute to heatmaps and use the segments on Garmin Connect, which is pretty much all of Garmin’s fitness watches and most of its bike computers. However, the lawsuit was dropped. Strava had already told Garmin users of their platform that they should not be concerned over connectivity stopping.
Strava had also previously told developers that Garmin attribution will be required when the data originates from a Garmin device, to comply with new Garmin guidelines from 1 November. This seemed to suggest that Strava was agreeing to Garmin's new application programming interface (API) rules, which has proved correct.
Now, there is physical – well, virtual – confirmation of that, with the technology used to capture an activity more prominent, whether that be a Garmin device or an iPhone.
On the 'You' page, there is also a list of recently used devices, so you can see how your activities have been tracked.
When the lawsuit was revealed, Strava's chief product officer Matt Salazar wrote on Reddit that his company were taking action because "we could not justify to our users complying with the new guidelines". However, those guidelines now appear to have been quietly followed.
Given the solution, it doesn't seem to be the big deal that caused two reasonably close fitness tech companies to fall out, but we don't know the whole story.
The good news for users is that the solution is there, and seemingly data will keep being shared between Strava and Garmin, and all other third-party apps too.
