I use it for a few things.
My weekly climbing and mileage totals.
A quick look back at weeks before events to see what I did in the past.
To see what friends are doing that are too far away to ride with. Like my grand son. To give them a thumbs up for a nice ride.
It’s not an app that I have to have but more of a convenience thing.
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Comparison IS literally sport competition. I can’t imagine leaving Strava, but hide uninteresting accounts from my feed.
I’m spending less mindless scrolling time and more true research time: segments, times, competitors, routes.
Interesting. I can definitely see how status in the network conditions enjoyment.
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I use it, but don’t pay it. Free version is more than enough.
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Has anyone been able to get their data out of Strava? I tried before I dropped them a few years ago and never got it. Wondering it I’ll get it now. I’d like to put it in a database to make it easier to search for previous workouts, and do some basic statistics, and got crickets the last time I tried to get it. Locking MY data/stats is bogus!!
And all my goals disappeared. 
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If by “data” you mean your rides or routes, Strava has always offered the ability to export individual rides.
If you mean media/comments/posts/etc., then doubtful.
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I just did the ‘download request’, and will wait and see what, if anything, I get. I can see them ignoring it, but that’s nasty…
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I pull mine occasionally, every 12 months or so when I remember. Most recently in September of this year. Put in the request and they emailed me the data within an hour.
They send almost everything - including all comments, goals, support tickets, etc. There about 40 different CSV files with your data in addition to the folders with all media, all GPX activities, routes, etc.
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Got the response really quickly. Downloading at the moment. Interesting…
1.5 GIGS. Wow…
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Likewise - I’ve used it extensively to prepare for races in the past, which is something no other tool has been able to do. In one place I can combine route, conditions, segments, my own data, and possibly most importantly other people’s historical data. No other tool comes close.
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If it’s any consolation, they just altered the algorithm for how your home screen displays and it’s an absolute mess. There’s no rhyme or reason in the default.
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Even though I seldom use the pro or social features I renewed my subscription because I feel that even the free version gives me a lot of value and I would hate to see strava disappear
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Yeah! I noticed that. Weird, seemingly no order in them at times…
It does, and a few of my friends all connected (in Connect) and it was great from the “I just want to know my friend exercised and give them a thumbs up” perspective. There are also little challenges like “who rode the most, who took the most steps, etc”…but after just a few months everyone went silent but stayed on Strava. It would work if everyone is committed to it, but it’s too easy to just go back to Strava, which you’ve all been using for a decade. Kind of like Threads trying to replace X, for example.
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Been a Strava user since like the very beginning of it. I still like it…has never me caused me stress in any way lol. I live abroad and my friends are scattered all over the world these days, so it great way to see what everyone is doing whether it be training, or racing, or just having fun social rides…it helps me keep in touch.\
Is it perfect? Nope, but I don’t expect anything to ever be. Still happy with it.
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I keep the free version but never really use it, I was a subscriber till the cost outweighed my use of it and I wasn’t a fan of how they do business to be honest. I can’t say I miss it, I didn’t really use the social aspect anymore as I just don’t like having that much information on myself out there among other things. And other apps and services duplicate what little I did use from the Strava service.
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Being tied to a brand is always going to be the challenge. Even if you could sign up (Can you?) without owning a Garmin device I can’t imagine a Wahoo user doing so.
Brand agnostic will always have greater appeal.
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Agreed. Even if you own a Garmin device, there’s so many services that can’t push activities to Garmin Connect that replacing Strava with Garmin Connect as a social or fitness data hub is a non-starter.
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I still really like it and use it a lot- I find it quite motivating just to see what other people and friends are doing and it encourages me to get out too. I’m only competitive against myself so can’t imagine being bothered by seeing other people’s activities if they’re more prolific/faster than me.
I would say I use the Calendar, Fitness and Freshness and Mapping functions pretty regular. I’m sure none of these are the best at what they do but its useful to have them all in one place and if you’re just a regular guy trying to keep relatively fit, they’re all good enough.
I’m always surprised at how much criticism it gets but more and more I seem to be in the minority so perhaps I am just too easily pleased. I will admit the recent AI provision seems pointless and I could think of loads of other stuff I’d rather they put that resource into.
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The big one for me was Peloton. There was a ‘utility app’ that could get the data over, but they sometimes didn’t work, choking on some little thing that Peloton includes, but Garmin (who created the language) won’t swallow.
This is purely a guess, but I think it’s because they want more money than the service is worth to most people, and for some reason people leave out that the free version does the job of being the hub to so many other fitness spokes. It still amazes me that they do this for free. I can easily see not paying for segments, mapping, etc., but losing that hub would be a pretty major disruption to the fitness world. Sure, there are other ways to get it done, but Strava is pretty ubiquitous.
There are also people with privacy concerns, although I’ve never understood what they are. (Yes, location data concerns some, but you easily hide that)
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