Strava is a social fitness app that allows athletes to track and share workouts to other users on the platform. Garmin creates GPS-enabled smartwatches and fitness trackers that are deemed the top choice amongst a large percentage of the running community. The 2015 cooperation agreement brought the two companies close together, allowing them to grow alongside the increased popularity of running. As of October 2025, Strava boasted 50 million monthly active users on their platform - signifying the widespread effects a fallout could have on their users.
The lawsuit first landed against Garmin on September 30 in a federal court in Colorado, with Strava claiming Garmin had ‘reverse engineered’ their heatmap and segment features. As a result, Strava sought a permanent injunction to prevent Garmin selling any devices that made use of these features. Garmin hit back strongly and threatened to cut user’s data from the Strava app entirely unless the app agrees to brand Garmin information more clearly. This involves the Garmin logo being present on every activity post, graph, screen, image, and sharing card.
Matt Salazar, Strava’s Chief Product Officer, labelled this move as “blatant advertising” and stated the company’s intention to prevent this from happening: “We have tried to resolve this situation with Garmin [...] but to no avail”.
The dispute has led to many fearing that their data, achievements, and records could be wiped from Strava, with Salazar also stating that Garmin had given Strava until November 1 to comply with its new guidelines or risk, “stopping all Garmin activities from being uploaded to Strava”.
Garmin is yet to comment on the dispute, and it might decide to keep it that way. Such legal disputes can take months or years to reach a conclusion, often ending in quieter settlements as opposed to the product bans Strava were pushing for.
However, if the two companies cannot reach a mutual agreement by the deadline of November 1, Garmin users may find that Strava will no longer sync with their device. This would potentially cause an irreparable rift amongst the ever-expanding running community.