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Strava and Garmin are having a fallout, and athletes on TikTok are not happy about “mum and dad fighting.”
Strava, a San Francisco-based fitness tracking app, filed a lawsuit against tech company Garmin in a Colorado court on September 30, accusing the latter of patent infringement and a breach of contract.
Social media has not taken the fallout well. Athletes on TikTok have posted videos about how “mum and dad are fighting,” referring to how two of the biggest names in the fitness sphere have clashed, and how it might impact their user experience.
Holly Brooks, an LA-based fitness influencer, joked that while the internet was invested in the Taylor Swift-Charlie XCX drama, from Swift’s newly released album, “there’s other drama going on on the internet.”
“Mum and Dad are fighting — Strava and Garmin have fallen out,” she said in her video, which has been viewed more than half a million times as of press time.
If they go through, changes to Garmin and Strava’s partnerships will come at an inconvenient time. Some of the country’s biggest races, such as the November New York City Marathon, are scheduled in the fall.
The turnout for these races is huge. The 2024 NYC marathon drew over 55,500 participants.
“If, like me, you run with a Garmin but you track everything on Strava, you will no longer be able to do that,” Brooks said. “You’ll be forced to use the Garmin app, because they’re not going to connect anymore.”
“Strava and Garmin please kiss and make up,” she added in the caption of her TikTok.
Another TikTok user, Rebecca, who posts videos of her runs, also commented on the Strava-Garmin dispute.
“When Garmin is going to stop uploading data to Strava on November 1st and that’s literally the date of your marathon you’ve been training for your big PR for,” she wrote in the caption of her video, which has over 600,000 views as of press time.
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Strava versus Garmin
In the lawsuit, Strava’s lawyers said Garmin, which makes fitness watches and wearables, developed heatmap tracking services that rivaled its own, violating a 2015 “Master Cooperation Agreement” between the two companies.
In a Reddit post on October 2, Strava’s product chief, Matt Salazar, also commented on Garmin’s new guidelines, which note that apps using Garmin device-sourced data must display the tech company’s logo clearly.
He said Garmin had given Strava until November 1 to comply with its new guidelines, or risk “stopping all Garmin activities from being uploaded to Strava.”
“We consider this blatant advertising. These new guidelines actively degrade your user experience on Strava,” Salazar said in the Reddit post.
Garmin, a Kansas-based corporation, saw its stock price rise by over 50% in the past year.
In the second quarter of 2025, it reported revenues of $1.81 billion, a 20% increase from the same period the year before. Of this, $605 million came from sales of fitness products.
Strava, a private company, has 150 million users in more than 185 countries, per its website. It works on a freemium model, providing basic features for free and charging for advanced features like route suggestion and training plans.
Representatives for Strava and Garmin did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
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