https://communityhub.strava.com/insider-journal-9/an-update-to-our-developer-program-13428
The gist of it is that Strava just killed its free API, and will now require developers to have a subscription.
At Strava, we care deeply about developers, and the health of the developer ecosystem. There are now 241,000 Strava API developers, up from 185,000 last year. Starting today, all current and future applications will automatically receive access to the Standard developer tier. This allows you to serve up to 10 athletes and start building immediately, completely eliminating the previous queue.
This essentially kills thousands of tools people build using the free API.
If you’re looking to move away from Strava, so far I’ve found four open source alternatives:
- CubeTrek - Open-source GPS track manager with 3D topography visualization for outdoor activities.
- Endurain - Self-hosted fitness tracking service for running, cycling, and more with full data control.
- RunnerUp - An open source run tracker for Android.
- Geo Activity Playground - Data analysis and visualization based on GPS tracked outdoor activities.
There are lots of alternatives. Apple has one Garmin has one. Google has one. etc.
There are many alternatives for tracking and analyzing performance data, but I’d posit that that’s not what most Strava users do there. For most of them, it’s a social network, and that’s it’s focus as it goes public. There’s no alternative “athlete focused” social network that allows planning and organizing group activities, has tight integration of activity info (e.g. tracking that the group bike ride averaged 20mph over this route, or that person X and I competed in the same park run, and here’s the finishing time for each of us, along with a few photos and some performance data like pace and heart rate).
All of those I listed have social features
Garmin requires Garmin devices to be if any real use. Same probably goes for apple. The reason strava is popular is everyone can use it, no matter their phone/device.
Edit: not advocating for Strava or saying it’s good. I don’t like it, don’t use it anymore.
I think Strava is just popular due to cultural inertia more than anything. Garmin, Coros, Fitbit, Apple, even phone apps. Not really hard to export data and move. 90% of what I saw on Strava before closing the account was Zwift garbage anyway.
Strava has the unique position that it is the de facto provider nearly everything does sync to. Even some chinese bicycle computer will sync to Strava, your obscure fitness tracker will too and that nice little app will also grab your data and display it. This nice ecosystem will end with these changes.