The Garmin – Strava partnership takes a wild turn and heads to court

Garmin under legal fire from Strava

Image Credit – PhoneArena

Strava filed a lawsuit against Garmin, claiming that two features for tracking exercise routes – segments and heatmaps – were stolen from it. The company is also claiming that Garmin violated a Master Cooperation Agreement by making its own heat map feature. 

The complaint seeks a permanent injunction in order to prevent Garmin from selling any items with segments or heat map features. That would basically be the majority of Garmin’s hardware products and its Connect tracking program. 

Garmin vs Strava is a bit strange, though

That lawsuit appearing at all is quite the curious event. Strava and Garmin are two big players in fitness tech, and those two have worked together for almost a decade. They have quite a lot of integrations between their platforms. At this point, it seems unlikely that Strava will be able to win the case. Another strange element is that Strava claims that these alleged infringements began a long time ago. So why all of a sudden does the company have a problem with them to begin with? 
According to his post, Garmin is adopting new developer guidelines for API partners that require Garmin’s logo on every post, screen, graph, image, and others… Salazar frames this as a move to protect users’ data. But could it be that’s a complaint that Garmin is putting its brand on the data its products collect?

Hopefully, the lawsuit won’t cause any disruptions to customers of both companies. 

There are all types of lawsuits in the tech world 

This one is indeed a strange one, as these two companies are regular partners. Hopefully, it will get resolved quickly, although these things never really get dealt with fast.

I think this case feels more like a business fight than a real patent issue. Strava seems upset about control and branding, while Garmin is trying to protect its own platform. In the end, both companies need each other, so dragging this into court feels like a bad move. 

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