Besides the community aspect of Strava, the app is pretty basic.

As far as anybody can tell, Strava has no plans to try to catch up on anything to actually provide capability to users.

I would imagine the vast majority of users track miles on a gps watch and then log that info into strava. I maybe see 1 or 2 people a month running with their phones.

Strava is for social networking.

It's not for tracking training or analyzing data. What moran would pay extra for the Strava analysis junk that you get for free if you buy a Garmin?

Mounty Pylon wrote:

Strava is for social networking.

And for the competition on segments.

They've not added anything of use for a while. In fact they took away the ability to pair to most BT bike sensors recently so they're actually going backward in that regard.

It's just a place where you can share your workouts with people who might care instead of Facebook.

Mounty Pylon wrote:

Strava is for social networking.

It's not for tracking training or analyzing data. What moran would pay extra for the Strava analysis junk that you get for free if you buy a Garmin?

It not really free if you have to buy a garmin

Besides the speed and quality of the google search engine, it's really a simple website. It just has one text input and a submit button.

The speed and quality of results is EVERYTHING, the community on strava is EVERYTHING.

Free_the_thigh wrote:

Mounty Pylon wrote:

Strava is for social networking.

It's not for tracking training or analyzing data. What moran would pay extra for the Strava analysis junk that you get for free if you buy a Garmin?

It not really free if you have to buy a garmin

You don't "have to," you want to. Or, more likely, you already have it.

I got tired of carrying a phone around while I ran. The point is that most people already have access to their automatically generated training logs and data analysis tools without paying anything additional.

For data analysis, I have my own spreadsheets as well.

Strava doesn't offer anything in terms of tracking you though. They just take the GPS data that you generate elsewhere.

I like to use Strava for trainings and a spreadsheet for races.

My father used to have all of his race results on one website, races since 1992. But the website quit. He felt this was really a shame, especially because of the statistics the website used to show. So, to help him, I created a spreadsheet for him to still be albe to track all of his races and it also shows all of his stats. If anyone would be interested in the spreadsheet, it is for download on this website:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/770606545/

I use it for both cycling and running and I think it is a little more functional for cycling. That said, most of what you're talking about should be programmed into your running watch anyway, unless you really are tracking everything with the Strava on your phone (pretty bulky).

It's interface is pretty easy to use and it gives me almost all that I want. I have no major complaints with Strava. One minor suggestion is that I wish they made it so you could have custom tags for runs (for example I would like one for "stroller" when I do a run with my kid(s). Or you could have a "snow" tag for when there was snow on the ground.

Strava is lame. Can't sort sequentially (by time, either on the app or computer) or add shoes (phone, has to be on the computer). They haven't really updated anything with the User Interface in the last 4 years, so, in a way, LR is more cutting edge than Strava!!

As business graduate/MBA student, Strava is heavily benefitting from first-mover advantage. They were just the first well-known social endurance sports platform.

Think about general social networks - Facebook and Twitter have been around for ages but still rule the world, and they also are far from ideal.

Strava can get away with not being innovative and stagnating (or even going backwards as someone mentioned) because they are "too big to die" and don't have fear of competitors entering the market. It might get better once Strava gets acquired by a huge company that wants to accelerate the growth of the platform, but if and when that happens is still in the stars.

I sort of suspected strava's features were lacking/not improving, but I did not know if runners felt this way at large. Do you think there is demand for a strava-like app that is a lot more focused on data analysis and giving good running insights? Not a social network. Or is that covered with training peaks?

I am replying to you but I am also curious what others think. Is there an underserved population of runners who want good data analysis tools?

Asking for a friend who has a pet project.

Strava is really poorly designed. They grew too quickly and didn't hire the talent to keep up. They are lucky they have no competition so they don't have to worry about being buggy as hell

Also the way they calculate average speed is a joke. A quick google and you will find people complaining about it for years but they won't change it. Just use Garmins average you clowns.

Mounty Pylon wrote:

Strava is for social networking.

It's not for tracking training or analyzing data. What moran would pay extra for the Strava analysis junk that you get for free if you buy a Garmin?

I did. You get Live Strava Segments which is nice.

data head wrote:

I sort of suspected strava's features were lacking/not improving, but I did not know if runners felt this way at large. Do you think there is demand for a strava-like app that is a lot more focused on data analysis and giving good running insights? Not a social network.

Well, yeah.

I think Garmin connect came up and made the mistake of default privacy setting. Most of my friends have garmin connect, but I can't see their workouts because they are private. I go over to strava and see everything they do.

Strava non-privacy setting lead to sharing publically the locations of US military bases in remote places. They were not punished in the market place at all.

I bet garmin would invest more in connect if it had more daily users of the social network portion. If it made it possible but difficult to transfer data from other manufacterer devices, I bet it would sell more watches fitness trackers.

I'm debating paying for summit because it is so hard to find stuff on either the garmin connect or strava app. I would like to see a 28 day calendar with time, miles and title in each day block of a 4x7 month block. If summit doesn't do that, I really need to look at another app.