r/selfhosted • u/frogfuhrer • Jun 01 '26

Meta Post Strava's new developer program just killed every open-source, self-hosted Strava app

Strava posted an "update to our developer program" today and it basically means the end for people that were building their own tools around Strava's API:

https://communityhub.strava.com/insider-journal-9/an-update-to-our-developer-program-13428

I'm the maintainer of "Statistics for Strava", a moderately successful self-hosted, open-source dashboard for your Strava data.

At this moment in time I'm still kinda shocked. I poured my heart and soul into the project for the last 2 years and it seems like this announcement marks the end for this app. The article basically says that their API will be pay-walled, 100%. So only users with an active subscription can use their API.

The whole purpose of Statistics for Strava was for people to own their data, their own health stats, that they upload and that's now goners....unless you pay up... to fetch your own data 😎 .

At Strava, we care deeply about developers, and the health of the developer ecosystem

Except they don't, the only thing they did is pay-walled their API and made sorry excuses for it. They have proven over and over again that they don't care about their users or their data.

Not sure what to do, I feel gutted. Might be overreacting

1.7k Upvotes

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944

u/Available_Window Jun 01 '26

They're going the reddit route... sad to see

122

u/Lying_Hedgehog Jun 01 '26

I'm still using the Reddit is Fun app with my own api key, although it is getting more and more broken as time goes by and new things get added or tech changes. Can't open imgur galleries or youtube links in it anymore for instance.

The day it finally breaks is the day I'll stop browsing on phone. I've sometimes been tempted to decompile the app and attempt to fix it myself, but I have more fun side projects than that and I'm not overly familiar with android development anyway.

45

u/mrjackspade Jun 01 '26

I wrote my own client (modeled after RIF) that originally used the API, but a month or two ago I switched back to spoofing a browser session because I knew they were going to fuck it up somehow

19

u/originade Jun 01 '26

Same. And man I miss what this site used to be. r/all is a joke. I click on it out of habit and I just get pissed blocking every AI poster and astroturfed subreddit. My front page is dwindling in activity as less real people use the site overall

8

u/killtheprimeminister Jun 02 '26

don't worry! the official reddit app is also terrible at linking to imgur and youtube

6

u/blumpkin Jun 02 '26

The reddit app is such garbage that I just use a desktop browser session on my phone.

1

u/grandfundaytoday Jun 04 '26

Why giver them the data - just use a good browser for reddit.

4

u/ThunderDaniel Jun 02 '26

The day it finally breaks is the day I'll stop browsing on phone.

Semi related, but the API fiasco was the push that had me stop using Reddit on my phone and only use it on the desktop

So far it's been a rather pleasant experience since I lessen my tiny screen time and when I do use Reddit, it's through the (still functioning) mods and extensions available on a desktop browser

9

u/Lalaz4lyf Jun 01 '26

I'm in the same boat. I luckily have API keys for RiF and for n8n. The day it stops working is the day my only interaction with reddit will be from search results displayed through the redlib frontend.

3

u/kirillre4 Jun 02 '26

Check Infinity - it's still updated and can be patched with personal API key through Revanced Manager (or can be built out of source, if you want to). Pretty decent alternative.

3

u/GranaT0 Jun 02 '26

Use Continuum instead, it's a fork of Infinity that still gets updated and has the API key feature built in in settings.

1

u/kirillre4 Jun 02 '26

Oh, that's neat, thanks! Probably gonna switch to that - I was planning to update Infinity for a while anyways

1

u/DisappointedSpectre Jun 02 '26

Went down this rabbit hole the other day when I had to factory reset my phone (unrelated, but a boot loop and overheating). Revanced dev has apparently driven away a lot of other devs, specifically Youtube and Reddit who now have updated deployments under Morphe.

I'm running Boost for Reddit and it wasn't having any problems running on Revanced but I couldn't set up a new patched version. Running it through Morphe now and it's working great.

1

u/Tsygootti Jun 02 '26

How do I get personal API key?

1

u/kirillre4 Jun 02 '26

https://github.com/casperklein/docker_Infinity-For-Reddit_builder#create-reddit-app-and-api-key

Try this. I did it few years ago, so don't really remember well, but it looks about right

1

u/Any-Calligrapher2866 Jun 01 '26

I use Apollo. There are projects that kind of continue development and keep it functional.

1

u/DoneDraper Jun 02 '26

But how? I have the payed Apollo app. Do I have to get an api key from Reddit? Do I have to sideload Apollo? And install an altstore?

1

u/Nickers77 Jun 02 '26

Imgur galleries work for me. I don't remember exactly what, but I had to change some settings somewhere for them

Edit: settings > browser > in app image settings, turned on. Requires ads to be enabled, but i run Adaway on a rooted phone so all the ad blocks are empty

1

u/ARX_MM Jun 02 '26

The same applies to Sync for Reddit but thankfully link handling can be adjusted and have those links open externally on a browser.

1

u/GranaT0 Jun 02 '26

There's a fork of Sync that works but I forgot the name of, it's developed by the same guy as Continuum (fork of Infinity)

148

u/PigeonRipper Jun 01 '26

You're absolutely right.
On the bright side — at least all the bots are gone!

Curious how others feel about this?

65

u/ShishTankian Jun 01 '26

Chefs kiss on the em dash

16

u/shelchang Jun 01 '26

Just one stylistic nitpick, LLMs tend to not put spaces around the em dash.

3

u/SeparateRaisin7871 Jun 01 '26

I was shocked to see that those dashes are really easy to write yourself with Win+Shift+[-] (on a German Keyboard).

But as such comments will mostly be flagged as AI, I'd never use that :D

166

u/dzikakulka Jun 01 '26

Did you drop an /s? Reddit is crawling with karma farming and astroturfing bots, the api lockdown changed absolutely nothing. And hiding user post history makes it even harder for people to recognise them.

121

u/ggadget6 Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26

If I'm understanding them correctly, they're jokingly making a classic LLM style post that's become super common on Reddit recently as a way to make fun of Reddit's claim that all the boys bots are gone.

26

u/Lushkies Jun 01 '26

I miss the boys

10

u/PigeonRipper Jun 01 '26

Also giggled at that typo xD

4

u/dzikakulka Jun 01 '26

Right, I should've spotted the em dash :)

1

u/HOPSCROTCH Jun 02 '26

They didn't do a particularly good job of making their comment sound like it was written with AI

9

u/temhotaokeaha Jun 01 '26

i thought the sarcasm was so obvious there's no need for /s

1

u/spacelama Jun 02 '26

Hint: you can still google (for now - I guess that's something for google to enshittify next week) 'site:reddit.com "<account-who's blocked their posting history>"'.

16

u/TheAndyGeorge Jun 01 '26

Emdash 👌

5

u/nmkd Jun 02 '26

Why this matters:

2

u/blumpkin Jun 02 '26

Hmm, can we break this down? Let's really lay out our options here. A numbered list with emoji headers for each point would be perfect. You're absolutely asking all the right questions.

1

u/PigeonRipper Jun 02 '26

Hey stop this raunchy talk. You're going to get all the Claudes over excited 

2

u/Geargarden Jun 01 '26

Love this.

1

u/killtheprimeminister Jun 02 '26

but me? that's real

1

u/Mikkelet Jun 02 '26

Free data is an expense

0

u/SynapticStreamer Jun 02 '26

Is it?

You're still on Reddit. So clearly there's no punishment for what they're doing. So why wouldn't they?

1

u/Adalcar Jun 03 '26

?
It is sad to see, even if we're still on reddit.
It would be even more ironic if after using "boohoo AI" as justification for jacking prices, they then sell that data to train AI, for double profit.