Is Strava on its way out?

It's not perfect, but I doubt it's on its way out unless they have some major mismanagement failures.

Strava has the inertia of a huge, established user base, and it has a "culture". I love the Garmin connect features as an individual, but it doesn't do the sharing/social part very well. Plus you need to have a Garmin device.

Strava will never die as long as people are still interested in comparing themselves to other runners. As long as the social pull is still there, flaws and all.

I don't think strava is going out of the game anytime soon

Strava is t going anywhere. It's an awesome app and tons of people use it.

I can’t run any more but I still bike goin on 80 chasing segment top 10’s and I have a kom that no one will break. It was through a sub-division that used to be open but now is completely gated right down to the sidewalks. It will last long after I’m gone.

Not anytime soon, but maybe in the future. Some good things going for Strava:

* Pretty much the only recognizable social media sporting platform. I'm sure there's others, but I've never heard of them. Even my non-running friends have heard of it.

* A subpoint of above, since it's pretty much the only one, it has the lion's share of users. First in the market and name recognition and all that.

*Its free features are more than enough for most users so it will continue to beat out other paid apps in terms of user adoption.

* They have a large userbase.

Some bad things going for Strava:

* Like almost every other tech company, they way overhired during the mini tech boom that happened recently. I know they had a huge spike in premium subscriptions during early to mid pandemic, so they tried to adjust staffing accordingly and seemingly way overshot their projections. The product isn't really that large and doesn't require that many people. I know there's more than the mobile apps. There's the marketing site to maintain, the social media presence, and what's that other things, Strava Metro? Still seemed overstaffed.

* No one really wants to pay for premium or pro or whatever. I can't tell you numbers because I don't have them, but it's hard to imagine Strava Pro subscriptions are really increasing relative to free subscriptions. It's even harder to imagine a set of new features that would make me, and a lot of other people, want to pay to use the app.

I think something either changes there or eventually, perhaps in years, they'll have to figure out what they're going to do with that userbase. My barely researched opinion is that they have users, momentum, and presence, but no totally viable way forward for long term growth. It's what many social media platforms have been dealing with, asking themselves, "How do we turn these users into profit?". See Twitter as sort of an example.

For me it's not comparing other people's stuff, I mainly use it to look at my training. I like looking at my training in Strava more than in the garmin or coros apps. So until there's a significantly better app to view your training I won't switch, and it would have to be a significant improvement, a slight improvement wouldn't be worth the effort/time to switch over and get my past training into the new system.

During the pandemic, I gained a lot of attention from staff after submitting my resume to them plus a privately developed demo application using their same software that I put together long before I thought about applying. I couldve honestly been a gamechanger for this company.

Except when I applied and got the response I then wished I hadnt applied. I am glad I didnt follow up when they did. I didnt think the app was really going anywhere and the whole pitch of the app goes against my ethos. I personally dont think runners should be that worried about what other runners are doing and I think to a varying extent it ruins the development of many. I can think of only a few benefits to sharing this information.

This.

Been a user for 10 years, loved the clean design, simplicity and social aspects.

But they got lazy, while the competition is catching up. The new pandemic users won't subscribe or stay, most are transient users and will shy off the competing aspect of Strava.

All they got left, which is significant, is a large user base. However, this does not guarantee longevity. Look at FB, twitter. They're still around, but they have been dominated by IG and Tiktok.

Strava lost my premium subscription to garmin, it has the same and more as far as training data and tools go, and all I had to do was buy the watch.

Strava however has all of my friends and teammates and athletes I look up to.

Instagram/facebook/meta sucks now, but it’s still the most popular app because that’s what people are using, and although there are probably much better niche social media apps out there, people don’t use them which kills the point. Strava is that but for running.

Ding ding ding. If I actually want to look at my HR or my cadence, I just use the free Garmin app and the visualizations are way better. But Strava lets me see what my friends are doing, which Garmin can't really do.

MySpace and a few others that I can't remember were pretty popular. It took years for people to slowly sign up for FB. Then years for them to slowly forget about MySpace. Right now it feels like almost no one new is signing up for FB. I reckon Strava still has a pretty high rate of new members, but there's definitely a chance for someone else to swoop in with a "better" product and start stealing users.