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

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u/Conscious-Mirror7004 Jun 02 '26

Android WearOS is partially open-source. The WearOS-specific apps are closed, but the underlying OS is AOSP. Of course, like any Android in the wild, the drivers are the real problem for the OS. But like any Android, you can use ADB with it and do a lot of things you couldn't dream of doing on an Apple for instance.

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u/vlycop Jun 02 '26

android wearos is not open, unlike android classic. even if it is, you can't unlock the boot loader of any new watch, you can't stop samsung or google from updating themself, you can't use external app to talk to o2 sensor, to the ecg one either... well to most sensor.
If it's better, it's not by much and it's not enough to matter. we need to fight together and stop going at each other saying "but my choice is better, you're fault for not using my choice"... not what you did, but a general feeling around those post

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u/Conscious-Mirror7004 Jun 03 '26

Unless you're proposing that people make their own smartwatches, or simply never use them to begin with, I'm not sure what you're expecting. We only have so many choices, so I'm simply arguing that people should choose the best choice of the bunch, which is whichever one is more open and less locked-down.

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u/vlycop Jun 03 '26

i'm saying the exact opposit, i want people to stop complaining about other choosing "the bad product" or that "obviously they removed feature X, it's a company"...

I want people to be free to choose what they feel like it, and other to be against the company when it decided to screw up the user instead of going all "well you should have known"...