FFS. How are these ideas remotely patentable in the first place? Software patents are pure dogshit.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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Heatmaps I have no clue, and hilariously enough, Garmin had heatmaps before Strava.
The segments one actually has some innovative ideas when I read the claims, but they filed for it multiple years after they offered it to the public so I have no clue how they got that patent either.
Yeah, software patents in the US especially, have become a way for companies to either kill competition, or make buying up ridiculous patents and suing for infringement their primary source of income.
Primary issue is the patent office has few officers that are technical enough to understand the overlap of the specific industry and software. So, they tend to just allow anything, especially from larger companies that they're told to assume have the expertise if they don't since their load is too large to have time to learn new stuff and truly research if something is obvious or not.
Yeah, although in this case, I'm not really sure what Strava expects to have happen. Garmin is orders of magnitude larger than them and hasn't lost a patent lawsuit in like 15 years. The most likely outcome I see of this is that Strava goes from 26 patents to 24 patents.
Probably just to try to make Garmin's product less useful in the short term while the case drags out. Or as a way to get Garmin to acquire them. Strava basically seems to have bought up some competitors that were failing and they have been on the way downhill. So at this stage usually these companies start cost cutting and using any means necessary to increase their perceived value for sale. This gives Garmin an incentive to buy them as that would end the lawsuit and they'd then acquire some additional defensive patents.
Polar superiority rise up!