I have to admit that I’m really struggling with trying to find a positive way to process Strava’s actions here. You should absolutely watch DCR’s video on the topic. There’s a lot to unpack, none of it good. The TL;DW is that Strava seems to be trying to euthanize its position as a data broker/aggregator for everyone’s activities by cutting off 3rd party apps at the knees. If they want to pull in Strava data, you can’t do analytics on it.

But here’s the thing, it’s not Strava’s data. It’s your data. They are just making it more difficult to get your data where it’s actually useful. None of the training metrics that Strava shows you is useful, and their AI (really struggling to call it that, it’s more like Strava MadLibs, there’s no intelligence there…) is a dumpster fire.

Fortunately, there are paths around Strava. Which is part of why I don’t understand Strava’s play here. I don’t need them in the middle, it’s just slightly more convenient that they are because I get my ride titles (my IP) where I can do actual analytics and load tracking. Ride titles make it easier to find activities later if I want to do comparisons.