Strava has withdrawn its lawsuit against its biggest provider of customers, Garmin, three weeks after alleging patent infringement in relation to its segments and heatmaps.
> Strava demands that Garmin stops selling devices over alleged patent infringement
The original lawsuit claimed that Strava had “suffered damages, including lost revenue and business opportunities, erosion of competitive differentiation and network effects, harm to goodwill, and unjust gains to Garmin.”
However, a post on Reddit made by Strava’s Chief Product Officer subsequently alleged Garmin were demanding “blatant advertising” on Strava’s website and that Strava considered uploads made to its app to be its users’ data rather than either company. That statement, which attempted to “set the record straight”, was criticised however after it was pointed out that Strava earlier this year started to require its data being explicitly labelled as belonging to Strava when it was uploaded to certain third party apps.
Other third party sites, such as Veloviewer, have already been prevented from receiving shared activity data in what was described as a crackdown on the fitness syncing ecosystem. In other words, data gathered elsewhere could be shared to Strava, but not vice versa.
> Strava CEO says fitness giant plans to go public to make “more and bigger acquisitions”
Sports technology journalist DC Rainmaker, who initially broke the news of Strava’s lawsuit, said the withdrawal was not a surprise as “the fact Strava would even file this case is mindboggling” considering “Garmin has the power to kill Strava stone dead overnight” if it turned off its syncing feature from its devices. He also reported that a Garmin insider had said his company’s response to the lawsuit was “not to blink”, a strategy that appears to have been vindicated.
Garmin has also become something of an expert in patent law, rarely losing lawsuits and owning more than 1000 patents. In contrast, Strava is reported to have around 20.
Attention will now turn to Strava’s continuing efforts towards becoming a public company which is courting the attention of major investment banks. Strava’s CEO declined to give a timescale in an interview with the Financial Times last week for going public but said they wanted “easy access to capital in case we wanted to do more and bigger acquisitions.”
Strava has continued to see a strong growth in its number of raw users and has an estimated 150 million accounts, of whom around one third are monthly active users, and approximately five per cent are paid subscribers.
6 thoughts on “Strava drops lawsuit against Garmin over alleged patent infringement”
Mission successful – prior to
Mission successful – prior to seeking a stock market floatation, demonstrate the superior business skills of our senior management by establishing to the market that the most significant part of our existing revenue is entirely dependent on the customers of another company which we have now totally pissed off. 🙂
And this may be exactly why
And this may be exactly why the owners are trying to float the company on the stock market.
They must’ve realized they’ve reached their glass celing – they don’t get much data directly from users independently from other companies (that would be very different if they had their own device). Not only that – they don’t have much intellectual property or raw market power to use as leverage against other players either.
A company with this kind of prospects is not easy to sell as a whole, so they will make an IPO, milk the cow taking advantage of the hype and shortly afterwards abandon the drifting (but not sinking yet) ship.
Stupid in the long term for the company, smart in the short term for the current owners.
Frankly, if a company starts
Frankly, if a company starts making decisions as insane as this, do you still trust them with your health data?
Informed media commentary suggests Strava is in the “extractive” phase of a company where they consider customer-hostile options to make short-term cash.
I’ve just cancelled my paid subscription, and requested my data for export BEFORE things get even worse.
Hoisted by their own
Hoisted by their own hypocrisy then.
Not a good look for Strava.
Not a nice company Strava,
Not a nice company Strava, cancelled my subscription a couple of years ago and very glad I did
I used to subscribe to Strava
I used to subscribe to Strava, until a couple of years ago when they sent a christmas message out to every user, including subscribers, that there was 20% discount. The small print read ‘Does not apply to existing subscribers’.
If someone at Strava had a brain, they would have sent it out to the users of the free version, instead of sending it to all users, pissing off a majority of their subscribers.
When my subscription expired, I refused on principle to renew it for that reason. To be fair, the data on Garmin Connect is in my opinion much better than Strava.