Polar Flow EXPLORE to close | Why That’s Good News

A note on Polar FLOW Explore page says the same thing as the email that many existing Polar customers have just received, namely that the EXPLORE feature will be closing in just under a month.

Polar FLOW Explore is/was a nice feature that allowed you to look at some of the real training of people in a location of your choice, enabling you to relive the workouts of others, see their stats and perhaps, more importantly, save the route into your favourites so that you could explore there yourself in the future.

I suspect it was a little-used feature that many didn’t even know existed – here’s where you shout out and say how often you used it. Quite a few of Polar’s other gems are also hidden away to some degree on the web platform.

Any routes/favourites you’ve copied from this will hopefully still work.

Why is it good news?

We all know that we can use STRAVA and other sites for similar purposes and now that Polar has better links with the likes of KOMOOT and STRAVA then the route discovery process can be done elsewhere. So it seems like Polar is retrenching back to their core offering. And FOCUS is always a good thing.

This might signal a change in strategy back to something like that offered by Wahoo Fitness, where peripheral and time-consuming elements of the platform are outsourced to 3rd parties. Usually, there is some free element to the service that those 3rd parties offer but ultimately the 3rd party company needs to service by getting some form of usage-based revenue.

Source: Polar