Popular fitness tracking device manufacturer Fitbit today announced a partnership with Strava in a deal that has the two companies giving users the ability to automatically share their fitness data between the two ecosystems.
Once users connect their Fitbit and Strava accounts any activity logged on Fitbit will be posted to Strava and any activity posted to Strava will end up on a user’s Fitbit timeline.
This comes as a welcome surprise to Fitbit Surge GPS watch owners who only last month got the ability to easily track bicycle rides on their devices. On the launch of the new bike feature many Fitbit Surge users felt that tracking a bike ride without being able to post it to Strava defeated the whole purpose of tracking the ride in the first place. That appears to no longer be a problem.
Strava already syncs with many GPS enabled devices and now a legion of Fitbit users will have to opportunity to see their activities tracked and ranked against Strava’s competitive disciples.
The only downside is for those who like keeping their two fitness timelines separate. Some use Fitbit for tracking casual activities like walking, sleeping, and dietary intake while saving Strava as a record of serious training efforts. Once the two apps are connected users will no longer have the ability to keep the two timelines apart.
In the end Strava gets a whole new set of compatible devices and Fitbit gets access to loads of location based fitness data while the users get a smoother way to combine their activity tracking timelines.
