Strava Says Bye-Bye to Bluetooth and ANT+ in App
As of October 28, Strava will no longer support direct Bluetooth and ANT+ pairing, according to an email sent to its users.
The company discovered a bug that causes the social training platform to crash for millions of users when heart rate and power devices were paired directly to the app.
Users must now capture heart rate and/or power data through GPS units or one of dozens of Strava supported training apps.
Strava users woke up Wednesday morning to a surprise email from the online training and tracking platform.
Only instead of the usual, “Uh oh! You just lost your KOM on Heartbreak Hill,” it was an uh-oh of another kind: Strava was announcing that it would no longer support direct Bluetooth and ANT+ device pairing as of October 28.
“When you record a workout on Strava, it’s our job to make sure your effort is captured accurately and reliably,” Strava said in the email. “We recently discovered that pairing Bluetooth heart rate monitors and power meters directly with the app is causing Strava to crash for millions of athletes—most of whom don’t even use these kinds of sensors.”
To improve the stability of the app, the company made the “difficult decision” to stop supporting direct pairing via these devices, a Strava spokesperson said in a statement to Bicycling. “Enabling Bluetooth and ANT+ connections directly with the App was making Strava unstable for millions of our members, regardless of whether they used the feature.”
That means members who routinely use their smartphones to record workouts and capture heart rate and/or power data will no longer be able to press record on their Strava mobile app and go.
Instead, data junkies will need to use another recording app like Wahoo Fitness, Garmin Connect, Fitbit, or dozens of others that you can set up to automatically sync to Strava.
If you use a GPS watch or bike computer to record your runs, rides, and training metrics, this change won’t affect you.
According to the company, most users were syncing from outside apps or units anyway, so though a difficult decision, it was one that made sense.
“We saw a significant decline in athletes using this method to bring data into Strava during the past several years,” according to Strava’s statement.
Those who still do use Strava’s mobile app for one-stop workout recording have been none to happy, however, as evidenced by angry Tweets yesterday afternoon.
Disappointed by the decision from @Strava to remove the ability to sync Bluetooth and ANT+ devices because it is buggy. Fix those bugs please instead of pushing me into buying new gear. #strava #cycling
— Rob Funcken (@RobFuncken) October 16, 2019
Strava hopes to ease the transition by offering tips for using GPS devices and other supported apps. They are also offering a 20 percent discount on Polar Vantage GPS watches until the end of the month with a promo link from the email.
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