Strava warns that Garmin could block the connection starting on November 1st

One day after making their lawsuit against Garmin public, Strava has published an explanation on Reddit signed by their product director, Matt Salazar. In that post, Salazar argues that the immediate origin of the litigation was not the patents themselves, but new guidelines for developers that Garmin had communicated on July 1, 2025 to all partners of its API.

The dispute between Garmin and Strava could leave millions of users without synchronization

According to Strava, those rules would require placing the Garmin logo on "every activity post, screen, graph, image, or sharing card", with a deadline of November 1, 2025 to comply or risk losing access to the API (which would prevent uploading activities from Garmin Connect to Strava). 

Strava's position is that this imposition would amount to "blatant advertising" that would degrade the experience of their more than 150 million athletes, and that they already provide attribution to their partners' data without the need to insert logos. In addition, they criticize that Garmin does not attribute third-party data (e.g., external sensors) in their own app. 

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The striking thing is that this argument does not appear in the lawsuit filed in the District Court of Colorado, where Strava accuses Garmin of infringing patents on Segments and heat maps, and of breaching the 2015 Cooperation Agreement (MCA). That lawsuit, reported by DC Rainmaker, even requests a court order to stop the sale of devices with those functions.

Other media outlets, such as BikeRadar, have pointed out that Garmin's current public brand/API guidelines require attribution, but do not explicitly require the use of the logo and allow it to be done with text indicating the Garmin model being used or with the logo. A nuance that contradicts Strava's narrative about the alleged mandatory use of the logo in all contexts.

With this statement, Strava has tried to explain that their legal action is in response to an escalation in the API integration conditions, while the courts determine whether there was patent infringement and breach of the 2015 agreement, a dispute that, if successful, could force profound changes in Garmin's products and platforms.