Strava has taken legal action against Garmin over patent infringements, and also new developer guidelines.
The legal action itself is over two patents, one around segments, and the other around heatmaps, but Strava has since said that the issue is developer guidelines for its API partners. New Garmin rules, according to Strava, mean that all activities recorded on Garmin should be shared with the Garmin logo.
Strava is 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.
The news was broken by DC Rainmaker on Thursday evening. According to court documents, Strava is claiming that it has "suffered damages, including lost revenue and business opportunities, erosion of competitive differentiation and network effects, harm to goodwill, and unjust gains to Garmin" because of the two patent infringements.
Despite the weight of the news, a Strava spokesperson said: "Our lawsuit is between two companies; we do not intend to take any actions that would disrupt the ability of Garmin users to sync their data with Strava and hope Garmin values our shared users in the same way."
A Garmin spokesperson added: "We don’t have anything additional to share as Garmin generally does not comment on pending litigation."
According to Strava, Garmin's use of heatmaps and segments on Garmin Connect infringes on Strava patents on the two. Segments especially are something that Garmin and Strava have worked closely on up to this point.
What this comes down to more, according to Strava, is Garmin's developer guidelines over API.
Matt Salazar, Strava's chief product officer, wrote on Reddit: "On July 1st, Garmin announced new developer guidelines for all of its API partners, including Strava, that required the Garmin logo to be present on every single activity post, screen, graph, image, sharing card etc.
"We have until November 1st to comply, and if not, Garmin has threatened to cut off access to their API, stopping all Garmin activities from being uploaded to Strava."
Salazar went on to say that Strava is trying to prevent this due to it being "blatant advertising" and that it is data personal to the user.
He wrote: "Unfortunately we could not justify to our users complying with the new guidelines. 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 to no avail."
However, Strava has its own attribution system in place, which means Strava data on other apps and sites need to be labelled as coming from the fitness app.
Last November, the American company announced that data such as leaderboards, segments and personalised workouts will now only be accessible on Strava, as the company moved to tighten its data control on third-party applications. Garmin is also reportedly not happy that Strava can used Garmin data to train its AI model.
Possibly connected to the litigation, earlier this year Garmin released a new paid-for version of its popular Connect app, called Connect+, featuring AI insights, training advice, challenges and a new and expanded Livetrack function.
For now, nothing will change for Strava or Garmin users, but the threat of compatibility between the two ending will hang over until this matter is resolved.
