Strava Announces Updates Including AI Feedback, Night Heatmaps & Dark Mode

At their annual summit, fitness platform Strava announced several new features which will begin to roll out to users from the summer of 2024, including dark mode, night heat maps, quick edit, AI feedback, and family plans. Here’s what we know about these new features. 

Dark mode has been the main request from Strava users over the past few years, and it’ll finally be available to those who prefer a dark background. It will automatically detect a user’s preference based on their device settings, but you’ll also be able to select the mode you prefer.

As part of their ‘Build For Her, Build For Many’ initiative, which is focused on women’s safety but applicable for all users, Strava will be introducing night heatmaps for paid subscribers. These work like regular heatmaps but are the popular routes used between sunset and sunrise. If you’re running in a new place and looking for a regularly-run route, specifically when it gets dark, we hope this might be able to help.

There will also be weekly heatmaps which take into account conditions as they change throughout the year – so if a trail or path is unusable in bad weather, then users should be able to see that easily and make route choices based on that.

The Flyover feature is also getting an update. Soon users can overlay the route with stats from the activity, and there’ll be an option to share this beyond the platform, though they haven’t shared much more detail on this yet.

Quick edits will allow users to make the most common edits quickly and easily. This can include hiding things like start time, maps, certain stats, privacy settings, while also changing images. It should involve just quick taps in the app to show or hide particular details. This is available to all users. 

Strava are also introducing a Family Plan Subscription. This can be shared between up to four people, and can be family members or friends, and you’ll get all the same features as an individual subscriber. Groups wanting to use this just need to be in the same country as each other and not be existing subscribers (users can cancel current subscriptions without losing data or workouts and then sign up to the new plan). Strava have announced this is coming in summer 2024 to certain countries and then rolling out from there, but they haven’t yet revealed what it’s going to cost (but it will vary by country). 

Athlete Intelligence is Strava’s new AI feature for paid subscribers. It won’t work like a chatbot, but it will allow you to select your aim for the week (Push, Maintain, Recover, Have Fun) and the AI will provide feedback, guidance and context to your activities based on those goals. The images above provide some examples of the insight you see from this new AI update, and as the machine learning improves, this should get smarter and more insightful.

As well as this feedback, there will also be something called ‘Leaderboard Integrity’ which will flag improbable or impossible activities uploaded. Perhaps that’s a bike ride that was mis-recorded as a run, or it may have a role in looking for those who aren’t playing fair in their sport. 

AI will also help with ‘Generative Routes’ to improve current route recommendations.

Strava announced all these plans under the banner of Progress, Together. “Strava is gaining momentum to realize our vision of a world connected through movement,” said Michael Martin, chief executive officer of Strava. “We are focused on two fundamental shifts to accelerate how we deliver value to 125 million people globally–building for women and leveraging Artificial Intelligence.” 

We’re often chatting about Strava titles at The Running Channel and the amazing support and comments we receive when we take on training and challenges, so it will be interesting to see how all these new developments play out!

All image from Strava