Strava Sabotaging their own company?

This morning I am left bewildered.

If not all of us, most of us who Mountain Bike use Strava to track our progress. If not you would of at least heard of the app and have some idea of what it is used for.

I personally only use Strava to track how often and how far I ride. I also use Strava at home when I ride my stationary trainer to track my Speed/Cadence & Heart rate. I am sure a lot of users would use this feature also.

Several months ago another app I was quite fond of using “Relive” announced that Strava would no longer work with their system even though they had kept up with security and privacy guidelines.

This was a massive surprise to me as this was a handy little feature that worked really well and I am sure this alone (have seen it first hand) would have brought new users to the Strava app.

This morning I awoke to an email….. The email basically stated that Strava moving forward would no longer allow the ability to track any external Bluetooth devices. That means devices like Speed/Cadence & Heart Rate sensors would no longer work directly with Strava. Instead they suggest using another app to track this data and feed it into Strava as a 2nd channel.

I may be wrong here but why would I stick with Strava if I have to use another app anyway?

Surely this will lose the company a lot of users? Don’t get me wrong I understand there are users whom use Strava for it’s social features and tracking Kpi, however allot of users like myself don’t use these features, so why stay?

I am totally lost for words.