- Strava and Garmin’s legal drama just took another big twist
- Strava has dropped its lawsuit against Garmin, where the two companies have apparently settled behind the scenes
- Where does that leave Suunto, which is also suing Garmin?
It looks like the legal battle between Strava – one of our top fitness apps – and Garmin – makers of the best Garmin watches – is coming to an end.
Three weeks after Strava filed a patent infringement suit against Garmin, alleging the latter’s segments and heatmaps features violate an agreement between the two companies, Strava has officially dropped its lawsuit against Garmin.
Strava posted a brief update on Oct. 21 to say it “voluntarily rejects” the action. We discovered this via DC Rainmaker, after keeping an eye on the Strava-Garmin situation as it developed.
The full update reads as follows:
“Pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 41(a)(1)(A)(i), Plaintiff Strava, Inc., by and through its undersigned counsel, voluntarily dismisses the above action without prejudice.”
In practice, dismissal without prejudice means that the decision is not final, so Strava may choose to file again in the future. But for now, that means any feature Garmin users make use of that potentially infringes on Strava’s patents isn’t likely to go away anytime soon.
If you’re in the market for a new Garmin watch, Strava is no longer actively trying to stop the sale of future Garmin devices that infringe on their patents, so expect plenty of Garmins to still be available in the upcoming Black Friday sales.
So is it all over?
Yes, and no. After filing the lawsuit, Strava product manager Matt Salazar explained in a Reddit post that Garmin tried to force it to reinforce the Garmin branding on Strava every time it used data from a Garmin watch, and said Strava would not be responsible for this misuse of user data.
Strava’s Reddit community did not respond as Strava expected, and the company eventually complied with Garmin’s requests. Now it has also withdrawn its patent infringement suit, leaving no further active spats with Garmin.
However, the question of “why” remains to be answered. There is speculation online that because Strava is going public in the near future, it wanted to reduce branding from external sources and nix competing features in order to increase the value of its shares – but of course, this is all hearsay and we can never know for sure.
What about Suunto?
Garmin is also being sued by rival watchmaker Suunto, which filed suit around the same time as Strava, though for unrelated reasons. These alleged patent infringements center around hardware and software features, such as some golf functions.
At the time of writing, the case is still unresolved. That dispute aside, Suunto is putting out some great hardware at the moment – you can see our recent review of the Suunto Race 2, where we gave it 4.5 stars – and could be a real challenger to Garmin as the best running watch maker.
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