Why it Matters that Strava Ended Sensor Support
As of today, Strava have ended Bluetooth sensor support in its iPhone and Android apps, effectively ending support for the smartphone-as-bike-computer for all but the most basic of use-cases.
Strava’s stated reason is that sensor support features a bug causing recording to crash mid-ride, so they’re pulling support. And they’re choosing to pull that support rather than fix the bug because they crunched the numbers and realized they needed to bank on third-party head units rather than raise smartphones as a competitor.
Follow the Money
Beyond courting trust-fund-hardened venture capitalists who’ve spent the best part of 18 months working their way up from the slums of Yale’s legacy admissions, Strava has three public-facing ways of making money:
- Summit
- Challenges
- Sponsored Activities (that is, when it says “Chunky Fungus rode with Wahoo Elemnt” or whatever)
They have other ways of making money, of course. Their desperate attempts to monetize the platform and drive value for shareholders also rely on things like licensing Live Segments to head unit manufacturers and… well, selling your data.
While it’s easy to see where manufacturers fit in for the Challenges and Sponsored Activities parts—that is, as direct sponsors for a flat fee of several thousand dollars (Challenges) or $0.75 per active user (Sponsored Activities)—the relationship with Summit (users directly paying Strava) is more complex.
Strava Needs Head Units
That’s because there’s a symbiotic relationship with head units. The existence of Live Segments drives both sales of head units and subscriptions to Summit. A unit that’s capable of displaying Live Segments will prompt you to want to use it, and once you’re a user of the service it’s hard to justify downgrading to a head unit that doesn’t support it.
Whether or not it’s a good idea for Strava to be charging certain head unit manufacturers to implement Live Segments (it’s not), the reciprocal nature of head unit and service binds manufacturers to Strava… for now. Strava’s freemium subscription model requires that it keep head unit manufacturers on board, and indeed, in the case of Garmin it goes beyond simple market share: Garmin is halfway to its own ecosystem and could easily forge Connect into a genuine competitor for Strava.
Rolling Back the Mobile Paradigm
And that’s the biggest way that Strava have thrown a bone to the head unit manufacturers. Ending support for sensors ends the viability of smartphones as competitors to head units… or at least ends Strava’s part in it. Which, let’s be clear, was a large part: the Strava app is by far the most used bike computer app, even if that’s not all it does.
Speaking of ecosystems, removing Bluetooth support kills a small part of the market for sensors that support Bluetooth. The horse has bolted, really, but recall that while ANT+ is open, it’s very much Garmin’s protocol. This is as much about pinning your colors to your mast as it is about effecting any type of behavioral change.
On the other hand, a discursive change is afoot. The delineation between smartphones and bike computers has become muddled as head unit technology has (very slowly) begun to catch up with other consumer electronics. The Wahoo Elemnt Bolt, Sigma Rox 12, and Everysight Raptor are all built on some kind of Android base, and the Hammerhead Karoo is so barely reskinned Android 6.0 that it’s mistakable for a phone or small tablet.
With sensors now almost uniformly supporting Bluetooth as well as the more specialized ANT+ and people already carrying superior hardware in their back pockets on their rides, it was inevitable that smartphones would become a viable alternative to dedicated head unit hardware. Effectively mounting a smartphone to the bike is more or less the final frontier, and it’s one that Wahoo and Hammerhead have already had enough problems with.
Something had to happen to reassure the market that dedicated bike computers are for serious cyclists, and that phones are for Freds. Well, something happened.
A Conscious Decision
Strava has an interest in keeping people using head units. It’s a revenue-based interest primarily, but their app-as-bike-computer was effectively pushing them down the road to becoming a hardware competitor (and, potentially, on the cusp of introducing another software competitor too).
It also has an interest in being perceived as a serious piece of software, since Summit is one of the few areas of cycling industry sales where high-end truly represents the biggest market rather than biggest margins.
Strava’s removal of sensor support from their app was not a straight act of being unable to support it, but a conscious decision made for better revenues, better relationships, and better revenues through better relationships. That’s not to say that supporting multiple sensor types across a variety of smartphone models is a simple task, but simply that a software company with the resources and user base of Strava could certainly continue to take it on with no issue if it so desired. It was no longer a desire, nor a priority.
When it comes to removing sensor support, Strava didn’t lie. This is just how they arrived at their truth.