Garmin vs Strava: Leak Shows Connect Targeting Strava

A recent leak indicates Garmin is reshaping Connect into a more Strava-like social platform. You can read the technicalities of that on Garmin Rumors, the real story is Garmin’s strategic ambition.

This article sets out what Garmin needs to do to compete as a sports social platform, why the position is surprisingly achievable from where Garmin sits today, and why Strava should treat this as a warning shot ahead of its planned public listing.

A successful sports social platform requires six things:

1. A critical mass of active users
2. An open ‘follow system’
3. Community infrastructure
4. A feed worth opening
5. A competitive engagement layer, like segments
6. Openness to any workout data

Strava has held all six since the early 2010s, whereas Garmin has the first three but struggles with the last 3. Were Garmin to enter any social platform contest, it would do so with these formidable, structural assets:

• A customer base that grew 42 per cent in fitness revenue in Q1 2026
• An estimated 45 million active Garmin Connect users
• A hardware sensor stack that produces physiological data, Strava can only dream of accessing

Let’s dive deeper into Garmin’s current position on each of those tests

Test 1. Critical mass of users

Strava reported more than 195 million registered users in April 2026, adding three million per month through 2025. Impressive.

Garmin Connect has approximately 45 million active users per the5krunner’s modelling.

Cliff Pemble disclosed strong double-digit growth in new registrations on the Q3 2025 earnings call, and Q1 2026 delivered the second consecutive 42 per cent fitness revenue increase, driven by volume.

Garmin has critical mass. The Apple Watch and Wahoo Elemnt owners are not in Connect yet. Once (if) they are, the user-count question changes shape entirely.

Test 2. An open ‘follow system’

Strava’s graph has been open from launch. Meaning that anyone can follow anyone without approval, the basis of an open social platform.

Garmin Connect has run a mutual-connection model where Following requires approval. The leaked app info indicates a rebuild around followers: mutual follows reframed as friends, follow requests and limits introduced, contact-based discovery added, privacy controls rebuilt around the new hierarchy. Garmin has not confirmed any of this, but the direction is consistent with what a social platform requires.

Test 3. Community infrastructure

Strava operates clubs, group challenges, and route sharing as core features, supports more than 50 activity types, and has acquired Runna and Recover Athletics.

Garmin’s community infrastructure is deep in training and recovery but thinner on the social side: groups, Connect IQ third-party content, Garmin Coach adaptive plans, expanding strength-training content, and a fully featured recovery stack.

The two platforms are converging from opposite directions. Strava is acquiring the training and recovery features Garmin built years ago. Garmin is restructuring the social features Strava has held for a decade. Where each is weaker, the other is stronger.

Test 4. A feed worth opening

Strava users are split into browsers, who scroll through the feed to see what others have done, and checkers, who open the app to see their own activity and how their training partners performed on shared rides. Strava serves both adequately, you might even say “well”.

Garmin Connect serves personal checking but struggles on the social side, lacking a Strava-style grouped-activity view and a decent social feed. Both are fixable, albeit a non-trivial exercise.

Test 5. A competitive engagement layer, like segments

Strava segments are the platform’s most enduring innovation. Every road, trail, street and loop can become a leaderboard. Of course, Strava knows the value here, and the full leaderboard access sits behind the subscription paywall.

Garmin has the building blocks in place to compete:

• Garmin Connect Segments, with native leaderboards visible on watches and Edge units
• Strava Live Segments via the long-running Strava partnership
• Badges, including expedition badges
• Time-bound and partner challenges
• Group competitions

The features exist. The cultural centrality of its athletes does not. Garmin owners who care about segments use Strava. Closing the gap means making Garmin’s Connect Segments a core social product rather than a feature buried in the activity view.

Test 6. Openness to any workout data

Strava seemingly accepts data from every wearable on the market. Apple Watch, Garmin, Coros, Polar, Wahoo, Suunto, Whoop, Oura, Peloton, and Zwift all flow in. The Apple Watch leads the device chart on Strava, and Strava does not care which watch produced the workout.

Garmin Connect is Garmin-first, Garmin-only, and that’s a huge problem if it ever wants to take on Strava successfully. My reading is that Garmin needs to open up to compete. But how?

Garmin can open Connect selectively without giving up the position that makes Garmin valuable. Here’s one way to do it via a selective openness model:

• Workout-level data, meaning GPS tracks, time, distance, pace, power, and heart rate, is accepted from any device for segments, leaderboards, group challenges, and the social feed
• Physiological data, meaning Body Battery, Training Readiness, HRV Status, Race Predictor, sleep score, training load, and recovery time, are available only from Garmin sensors and their owners

Connect+ is the natural vehicle. The Apple Watch or Wahoo Elemnt owner cancels their Strava subscription and subscribes to access the social and competitive features. Why? Perhaps all their sporting buddies have a Garmin.

The Garmin device owner gets the same access for free, plus the full physiological stack. The segment culture migrates from Strava to Connect because Connect’s leaderboards are populated and competitive. The hardware moat stays intact because the physiological computation requires sensors that only Garmin makes.

One closing thought is that Garmin might have to tweak its approach to segments, possibly restricting their mass creation and the confusion and inconvenience that it causes on Strava.

Where Strava is failing its own users

Strava is dominant. Strava is also a product sprinkled with sustained quality problems:

• Feed noise. Algorithmic ranking is weak. Activities from accounts the customer barely knows mix with activities from close training partners.
• Paywall hostility. Features that were free for years moved behind the subscription wall, including segment leaderboards, training analysis, and route building.
• Shallow analytics. Pace, distance, elevation, heart rate, and basic time-in-zone. Athlete Intelligence has improved this. The baseline remains thin compared with Garmin’s free tier.
• Slow, crowded mobile app. Multiple tabs compete for attention. Settings are buried. Features have accumulated without redesign.
• Degraded segment quality. User-created segments overlap and duplicate. Leaderboards still include cheats and vehicle-tagged activities despite improvements to Athlete Intelligence.
• Partially integrated acquisitions. Runna and Recover Athletics sit alongside the core Strava experience rather than within it.

Garmin needs to be better than Strava on the features customers care about. Strava has created a meaningful product gap for exploitation.

The data moat

Garmin’s first-party physiological stack is its defensive moat. Sleep, HRV, Body Battery, Training Readiness, Training Status, Race Predictor, Recovery Time, and the full sensor suite work only with Garmin hardware. Strava can only calculate a limited number of these because Strava does not own the sensors.

The strategic logic extends beyond a race to be the last platform standing. In an AI-driven future where software and app layers are swept away, the hardware data layer must remain. AI needs its facts.  AI coaches, AI insights, and AI training plans all require something to digest. The party that owns the sensor producing the data is structurally shielded to a good degree. The party running the software experience on top is not.

Selective openness to competitive hardware preserves the moat. Workout data flowing into segments and the social feed is replaceable. Physiological data flowing into Body Battery and Training Readiness should not be.

The verdict

The leak indicates a follower-based system in flux. Q1 2026 earnings provide evidence of the user base growth required to support a social platform. Connect+ provides the route to expanding reach without breaking the hardware moat.

Garmin has three levers available, none of which require imitating Strava directly:

• Selective Connect+ openness to third parties. Workout data in for segments and social. Physiological computation gated to Garmin hardware. The Apple Watch and Wahoo Elemnt owners become Connect+ subscribers. The segment culture migrates. The watch sale is preserved.
• Product split inside Connect. The analytical and social sides are treated as distinct propositions. Connect Analytics remains the moat. Connect Social becomes the open platform.
• The hardware sensor is the long-term defence. The physiological stack is what Strava cannot match structurally without richer sensor data and what protects Garmin in an AI era where software layers commoditise.

Strava’s tagline built the company. If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen. Garmin has earned the right to a different claim. If Garmin hasn’t Connected it, it wasn’t worth doing.

Strava’s preparations for a public listing arrive as the competitive landscape shifts beneath the company, with the recent litigation against Garmin already complicating the narrative.

Last Updated on 1 May 2026 by the5krunner

the5krunner

tfk is the founder and author of the5krunner, an independent endurance sports technology publication. With 20 years of hands-on testing of GPS watches and wearables, and competing in triathlons at an international age-group level, tfk provides in-depth expert analysis of fitness technology for serious athletes and endurance sport competitors. ID