https://communityhub.strava.com/insider-journal-9/an-update-to-our-developer-program-13428
The gist of it is that Strava just killed its free API, and will now require developers to have a subscription.
At Strava, we care deeply about developers, and the health of the developer ecosystem. There are now 241,000 Strava API developers, up from 185,000 last year. Starting today, all current and future applications will automatically receive access to the Standard developer tier. This allows you to serve up to 10 athletes and start building immediately, completely eliminating the previous queue.
This essentially kills thousands of tools people build using the free API.
If you’re looking to move away from Strava, so far I’ve found two open source alternatives:
It says all apps will have automatic access to the standard tier. How is that killing anything? It sounds more like they’re removing an approval process.
Edit: ok but further down it also says “subscription required”. I’m confused.
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Yeah that’s why I’m confused. It says it’s automatic, then later says a subscription is required.
“10 athletes” seems to be the bit you’re missing.
I guess the automatic has the 10 user limit. and the subscription is needed for a proper app that people use.
How many people are personally operating more than 10 athletes? Are there that many enormous super-athlete families that all rely on Strava?
It’s for the API, meaning when you code an app and use strava you have a maximun of 10 users, everything else is just gone.
10 users using your app isn’t much.
So each person gets their own API key when installing some custom app. This is normal procedure. I’m not seeing an issue with that part.
That is absolutely not normal procedure. Apps generally use one universal API key per API surface, not unique keys per user.
For first-party apps. Most second- and third-party apps I use require people to have their own API keys.