Strava Takes A Major Step Forward By Acquiring Runna

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Summary

Strava has announced its plans to acquire Runna.
Runna uses AI to provide users with customized plans to improve their runs.
Runna also has a community feature like Strava.

Strava is considered by many to be one of the best fitness apps on the market. Not only do you get a feature-packed app that allows you to track your physical activities, but it also provides an element of fun and community, with the ability to share activities and progress with other Strava users.

And while it built up its following by allowing third-party apps to get in on the fun, the brand took that away late last year, closing off support due to safety concerns. With that big change, comes another, as Strava announced that it has acquired Runna, an AI-powered training app that also has a built-in community feature as well (via TechRadar).

A new beginning

For the most part, it’s unclear how this will effect the 150+ million users that use Strava. But we can only hope that this will improve the app and make it better, allowing more AI elements to assist runners to achieve their best.

In the press release, Strava also shares that at the moment, there are over “100 training apps currently connect to Strava’s API in order to provide users with enhanced features and functionality.”

This is no doubt highlighted in the announcement, since the brand recently changed the way third-party apps can access its API. The brand also shares that it “remains firmly committed to maintaining this role as the open platform for fitness and to supporting all developers.”

It’s unclear what this all means, since many apps were negatively affected when Strave made its big API change. As just a small example of what followed after the change, third-party apps could no longer display Strava activity data. And apps were also cut off from leaderboard data as well.

As you can imagine, apps that previously relied on this data will no longer work the way they used to, and that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Of course, the transaction still needs to be finalized, but if there is no big opposition, then it looks like Runna will become a part of Strava. Again, it’s unclear how this will affect either app in the future, but it probably won’t be long to see the results.