If you’ve recently opened the updated version of Strava on your phone, you’ll have noticed that the platform looks a little different now. You’re probably still adjusting to the tweaked layout on your profile and seeing fiery orange, crest-shaped icons all over your activity feed to identify the subscribers.
But this visual change isn’t the only modification that Strava has made to its platform. Strava has improved – and will continue to improve – a suite of features for its subscribers, especially when it comes to all-important route planning. Plus, Strava users who enjoy competing for spots on segment leaderboards – or even those coveted QOM or KOM crowns – will be delighted to know that Strava has wiped millions of impossibly fast, non-running activities from the rankings.
Here’s what else you need to know.
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More reliable and interactive routes
If you’re visiting a new place or trying to diversify your routes near home, you might not have the creativity or bravery to plot out some courses on your own. What if you take yourself to a dead end, or an area that doesn’t feel safe to run around? Or what if your route is just plain boring? Thankfully, Strava can now generate AI-powered route suggestions that are even smarter and more intuitive than before, based on the platform’s Global Heatmaps. These dynamic heatmaps highlight the routes that are most frequented by Strava’s community of runners in any given area, which makes them a safe and sound option for others looking to rack up some miles in the vicinity.
If you want to start at one point and end your run elsewhere, from July you’ll also be able to use Strava’s new ‘Point-to-Point Routing’ feature to find the most efficient route from A to B. Even better, it’ll give you the most direct route according to your chosen activity – so if you’re running, Strava will advise you to follow pedestrian-friendly paths rather than motorways or long-forsaken footways.
Sometimes, though, simply getting from A to B isn’t enough – we want to visit landmarks along the way, pitstop at a beautiful vantage point or finish our run at the best coffee shop in the area. From June, Strava will feature more detailed ‘Points of Interests’ on its maps, which means that you can tap on restaurants, public toilets, viewpoints and more to find out about these specific amenities or areas and plot the best route to take you there. You’ll also see key route details like elevation, distance and estimated time to arrival, as well as photos of the location from other Strava users.
Fairer leaderboards
For most Strava users, the platform is a place to log your running (and other sporting) activities, track your progress, discover new routes and support others by dishing out kudos. But for some, Strava is a venue for friendly competition, where you can rise up segment leaderboards for running parts of your routes – the ‘segments’ – in faster times than others.
The first piece of good news is that Strava has doubled the number of live segments globally, giving competitive Strava subscribers a chance to run their best-ever times on even more routes, wherever they are in the world.
Perhaps most welcome, however, is Strava’s ongoing work to automatically eliminate unrealistic activities from the top 10 spots on run leaderboards – the ones clocked by cyclists, motorists or runners whose GPS has gone completely awry. In the past, Strava users had to manually flag leaderboard entries that seemed false – like a 2km segment completed in two minutes, for instance – and wait for Strava to individually investigate the complaint before taking any action. Now, Strava has a machine learning model that does the work for us – and since it was first launched this February, it has already removed 4.45 million activities that were recorded in vehicles or as the wrong sport type, resulting in a fairer app for all.
