Strava: Run, Bike, Hike 4+

I love strava & will continue to use the app but am disappointed with recent updates. I really enjoyed the leaderboard & monthly comparisons, which can now only be accessed through subscription. I would consider becoming a subscriber because I am a huge fan, but the cost has been a deterrent. I can understand their decision to try & make the app more profitable. However, I think they should have given longtime users the option of buying those features at a lower cost. I am simply someone who loves running. But I am not training for anything & given the surgeries I’ve had it is unlikely I ever will. Some of the other subscribed features may not suitable for me because of that. I want to support the app but I just don’t think the price is that accessible to everyone. I understand $60/year isn’t much, but when you’re a newly unemployed college student it’s difficult justifying that extra expense. I still really enjoy the app, I just hope these changes don’t alter how much I use it. I think if i never experienced those features I might feel differently. I am sad to see them go. Wish there was more of a middle ground for less competitive individuals.

Okay so this is a bit of a rage review. I've been using strava pretty dilligently for about 2 years. It's been mostly great, showing timed splits and elevation gain to give a good granular sense of what happened during a workout. It's really all I wanted, since I don't intend on getting heart rate monitor.

However, lately strava has been goofing up on time elapsed, distance gone, maybe my actual location? Not sure. But it'll take a good half-mile for the app to figure out that I've started moving, even after manually starting a workout and confirming that my location is correct. It will also just stop registering that I'm still moving in the middle of a workout, paradoxically showing my location way off of the blue line while the timer is still running. This throws off all the calculations for timing and honestly is pretty disheartening that I don't have an accurate record of my efforts.

I know strava gets is revenue from user data, but why am I using this broken app if it isn't even giving me the data it has advertised? How reliable is the background data being collected? At this point, I might as well go back to using the timer and maps apps built in to iOS, since I'm already using them to figure out what strava did wrong in the first place.