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Comment by ptmcc | Hacker News Reader

Strava has been stagnating for years at this point. I used to really love their site, and I've still been a pretty active user, but I can't even remember the last time they introduced a meaningful new feature or improvement.

And their paid subscription offers me, a non-racer, basically nothing. I checked it out once before, but cancelled after realizing there's no substance to it for a casual/enthusiast.

And now this recent dispute with Relive just indicates that they misunderstand their place as a platform. If they want to start acting like Oracle and be a bully rather than an innovator, then good riddance to them.

There is nothing special about Strava except inertia at this point. There are MANY competing services and platforms, and perhaps it is time for me to consider switching.

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Strava is the only social network from which I derive any real value. I don't need them to constantly mutate the product.

They could at least improve it.

The graphs are tiny and noisy, there's no reason they can't use my whole screen and offer a filtered version.

The segments are made of poor GPS data from a single activity, and the leaderboards are filled with unrealistic times that could easily be filtered out automatically.

The maps are old and lack data that's been in OSM for years.

The heatmap combines MTB and road bikes, so when planning a ride you don't know if you're looking at tarmac or a single track filled with roots and rocks.

There's no support for multi sports like swimrun or triathlon.

No support for interval training.

On multiple occasions the Android app has stopped logging, even when the GPS has worked fine in other apps running concurrently.

The three top voted feature requests on their community discussion board are all 7 years old, number four is 6 years, then there's a couple more from 7 years ago.

https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/2005373...

And so on. It's fine not changing what works, but there are lots of room for improvement but nothing happens. If they had a single engineer working on new features or fixing broken existing ones they would have released improvements several times per year. When was the last time they did that?

Exactly!

I'm not saying that Strava needs to constantly reinvent itself and add groundbreaking new features and changes -- I'd prefer they don't! But there have been the same long list of bugs, quirks, and limitations for literally years. Plus the same handful of most-desired features by the community have gone largely unimplemented and ignored.

In addition to your list, I primarily use a Garmin device, but I do occasionally use the mobile and watch apps and they have some pretty huge limitations for seemingly no reason. Like why are there so few activity types that I can record on my Apple Watch? I can manually reclassify them later in the web app, but why do I have to do that?

And why is the mobile app lacking in features like equipment tracking, something pretty basic that has existed on the web app for years?

Also the Apple Watch app has corrupted multiple activities that simply refuse to upload (rejected by Strava's servers), and Strava Support has told me "tough, there's nothing we can do or look into". They don't even pretend to care or ask for details to investigate.

It's one thing to have a stable, mature product with great support but Strava has not proven to really be any of those things over time. They've built up a decent social network of athletes and enthusiasts, but the tech & product side has completely stagnated.

Around here it seems like runners use various different activity trackers, but among cyclist Strava is the de facto standard. If you meet another cyclist you can be pretty sure you'll find them later on Strava flyby (a neat feature, I'll have to give them that). It's mindblowing how they seem to squander such a huge market lead in what I assume is a pretty affluent market.

Besides improving their product they could easily add more monetization paths, like offering users to buy new equipment from affiliates, working together with race organizers and accommodation facilities, and there's probably other things as well. Instead they go into hibernation and do the old "more or less useless features behind a premium membership" business plan.

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