Strava has reversed course on their recent disablement of Apple Health sync for 3rd party workouts (e.g. data from Zwift, TrainerRoad, Garmin, etc..), after abruptly disabling the feature last week without notice. That move impacted many Apple iPhone users that have used Strava for years to help consolidate their numerous workout data sources into a single Apple Health repository. Strava’s change not only broke people’s ability to close their daily activity rings, but it also impacted health insurance programs that leveraged Apple Health as a central database (and the long-existing Strava sync to fill up that database). Not to mention numerous other apps that leveraged the Apple Health data.
After countless reports of Strava support tickets opened and canceled Strava accounts, Strava Support has just started sending out a pre-canned message apologizing for the change, and notifying users that it’s been re-enabled. A copy of one such message is below:
“Hi [username],
We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience and frustration this change caused. We have turned syncing back on for third party applications to Apple Health. All your activities should start transferring again, including those missed from the last few days.
This means your Zwift, Garmin, TrainerRoad, Peloton, Wahoo, or whatever app you use to record your workouts on Strava will once again make their way to Apple Health to close those rings. Keep striving on and we’ll go back to the lab to figure out a better way to prevent duplicates from happening on Apple Health.
For more information please visit our Help Article and any troubleshooting to sync any missing activities from the last few days.
Best,
Strava Support Team”
The notification to users (or at least, those that opened a ticket) acknowledges the “frustration this change caused” users, and goes on to say that all activities will start transferring again, including those from the gap days where the feature was disabled.
You may remember the core reason Strava cited that they disabled this long-standing feature was that it was creating duplicate entries for consumers that accidentally enabled sync to Apple Health in two places (e.g. in both Strava and Garmin Connect). Undoubtedly this probably occurred to some consumers, but Strava’s solution was simply killing it for everyone, versus trying to engineer a better solution to preventing duplicates (such as intelligently detecting whether a secondary service is already syncing).
The company acknowledged that as well, saying “we’ll go back to the lab to figure out a better way to prevent duplicates from happening on Apple Health.”
I reached out to Strava, and their official response is:
“Our attempt to prevent duplicate activity uploads from posting to Strava created unintended consequences for our athlete community. After listening to their feedback and assessing the situation we have decided to turn syncing back on for third party applications to Apple Health.”
While the unannounced change certainly wasn’t ideal, I’m glad to see Strava of 2022 reversing this decision so quickly and getting consumers functional again. We certainly never saw that with the Strava of 2019 and before. So…kudos as they say.
With that, thanks for reading.
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