Strava Stops Syncing to Apple Health for 3rd Party Data

Edit: This is now a non-story as Strava changed their mind and have put it all back to normal…at least for now.

Story starts:

Many people use Strava and/or Apple Health as an intermediary to get their workouts to or from somewhere else. As of now, this has got a whole lot harder if you ever rely on Strava.

Table of Contents (Click to Expand)

Background

Apple Health is supposed to be the complete repository of all your workouts and health stats.

Strava, on the other hand, is supposed to be an accessible, mass-market training platform that got famous due to its segments features. Some people use it as their complete set of workouts. (I do)

The Problem

In Strava’s rush to be as accessible as possible they encouraged just about every single sports platform ever to link their data. And just about every single sports platform dutifully obliged.

I guess that’s fine but before you know it duplicates start appearing and, whilst that won’t affect your segments too much, it will affect your ‘number of run/rides’ weekly totals, training load and more besides. Duplicates are not good.

It’s a similar thing with Apple Health who don’t want duplicates

I suspect that Strava has become too successful here and that they have to facilitate tens of millions of data transfers every day that probably wouldn’t be necessary if everyone set up their sports data platforms perfectly. Hmmm

I have many sources of potentially duplicate data and confess to not finding a 21st-century solution to my sports data. Sure I can carefully enable one-way permissions here and two-way permissions there but I will make a mistake at some point or forget my original intention at another point and it will all invariably break. Thus, my master-set of MY sports data is updated manually…which takes time and which is annoying.

What’s Just Happed

Strava still links to Apple Health for any workouts created with the Apple Watch or with the Strava app. They will all find their way to nicely co-exist on Strava & Apple.

But…

If, on the other hand, your workout comes from anywhere else like Garmin, Zwift, Wahoo or Peloton then Strava will neither read it from Apple nor send it to Apple.

Source: strava.com (via dcrainmaker)

Read the dcr article here

Affected: I use a Garmin watch and link Garmin Connect to Strava. Strava sends my data to Apple Health to complete my rings. Solution: Also link Garmin Connect to Apple Health
Affected: I use a Garmin watch and link Garmin Connect to Strava. Apple sends my data to Strava to update my segments. Solution: Also link Garmin Connect to Strava
Affected: I use the adidas app and link directly to Apple Health. Apple sends my data to Strava to update my segments. Solution: Also link adidas to Strava
Not Affected: I use the Strava app on my Apple Watch to record workouts
Not affected: I use the Strava app on my iPhone to record workouts.

The Solution

The precise solution will heavily depend on exactly what you are trying to achieve with your unique set of apps. However, in general, you will need to set up or disable links between all of your favourite app(s) and Strava &/or Apple Health. You may very well encounter mini problems with certain snippets of data, like calories, that some apps don’t synchronise.

Alternative ways to link apps together include RunGap (which I pay to use) and HealthFit (that I used to use)

Thoughts

I can see this will hack off a lot of people and I have a lot of sympathy for them.

Strava continually processes vast amounts of data and they are generally pretty good at working through the ramifications of what they do. I just can’t believe this has been done for any reason other than to ease the load they have to contend with.

Anecdotally I’ve noticed both my Strava subscriber accounts recently seemed to always take several minutes to find and calculate my segment performances when a few months ago it used to be instantaneous. Also anecdotally, my 2.5-hour ride from yesterday calculated segments today within 30-seconds. Maybe the changes are working? Maybe not!

2 thoughts on “Strava Breaks the Sporting Internet – Well, at least the iPhone part of it”

Tobias Fahrig says:
15 March 2022 at 3:20 pm
is it really Strava’s job to be a sync service for all 3rd party types of apps who are too lazy to have an proper apple health integration? Or even heavyweights like Garmin Connect didn’t get the apple health sync implemented correctly with accurate data? Strava does the right thing here
1. tfk, the5krunner says:
  16 March 2022 at 10:36 am
  nope, it’s certainly not their job to do that.
  neither is it their job to hack off paying subscribers by removing longstanding functionality

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Strava Breaks the Sporting Internet – Well, at least the iPhone part of it