Strava tells Garmin users not to worry amid legal dispute: 'Uninterrupted connectivity is our top priority'

Strava has told Garmin users of their platform that they should not be concerned over connectivity stopping.

Earlier this month it was revealed that the American fitness tracking company had taken legal action against Garmin over patent infringements, and also new developer guidelines, which led to fears over connectivity.

However, a spokesperson for Strava said this week: "Uninterrupted connectivity for the subset of our community that uses Garmin remains our top priority."

Strava sent an email out to developers last Friday, 11 October, telling them that Garmin attribution will be required when the data originates from a Garmin device, to comply with new Garmin guidelines from 1 November.

The updated application programming interface (API) reads: "Activity data obtained through the Strava API may include data that requires attribution to Garmin. Therefore, if your application displays information derived from Garmin-sourced data, you must display attribution to Garmin in the form and manner required by Garmin’s brand guidelines."

According to Strava, "even downstream developers that do not connect directly with Garmin to include brand attribution when data is sourced from a Garmin device".

Previously, 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".

Similarly, the Strava spokesperson said this week: "We don’t agree with the extensive branding Garmin is forcing."

They continued: "We have also decided that we will give similar attribution to all of our device partners going forward to be fair. Our aim is to make branding as unintrusive as possible and we believe it is the right thing to do in light of the mandatory changes that Garmin is asking all developers to implement by November 1st."

When news of the legal action broke, a Garmin spokesperson said: "We don’t have anything additional to share as Garmin generally does not comment on pending litigation."

While the legal dispute is yet to be solved, it appears that riders or runners who use Strava and Garmin need not be overly worried about the two platforms suddenly not connecting to each other, as of 1 November.