Sports app picks up the pace with new features and dark mode

If we like to exercise, if we are professional athletes or if we simply want to improve our health, one of the most complete applications is Strava. Used by 125 million “active people” (as its creators like to call them), Strava has become much more than just an exercise tracking app, and its social features such as messaging with Strava have won over people. users.

Today, Strava announced a big internal change that will result in accelerated development of new features and products; This is something that will be noticed immediately, with an update to its application that will bring new features that users have been requesting for years.

For example, one of the most popular changes is the new dark mode. As with other apps, the goal is to reduce eye fatigue and improve accessibility when using the app, especially in low-light locations; It will be configurable to be activated according to the theme of our mobile, or leave it in light mode if we prefer. Dark mode is the result of an updated design system, allowing Strava developers to implement changes more quickly; Concretely, dark mode will arrive throughout this summer.

As it could not be otherwise, Artificial Intelligence has a great weight in the latest Strava news; the company claims it helped them implement new features faster. One such innovation is AI-Enabled Ranking Integrity, which uses machine learning to identify “irregular, improbable or impossible” activities that have been recorded. It has trained with millions of activities, and this may be the solution athletes have been waiting for to make the ranking fairer and better reflect their efforts.

Strava’s future lies in AI and machine learning, and its accelerated product roadmap is based on this technology. This includes the latest development, Athlete intelligence, which transforms users’ training data into an easier-to-understand summary, with context for their achievements and goals. Strava claims that, unlike other training services, this intelligence connects to thousands of fitness devices and apps, allowing the athlete’s full history to be included across various sports and modalities.

Strava also highlighted studies showing that women participate in sports at a much lower rate than men, for several reasons: Although they want to be active, they find neither the opportunity nor the time to do so. dedicate to it. For this reason, Strava has introduced several new features that seek to change this, like nighttime heatmaps that show the most popular roads, routes and trails between dusk and dawn.

Quick editing will save us time, allowing us to adjust the most common options such as activity name and privacy settings, allowing us to hide start time, map or other statistics . Additionally, Strava introduced a partnership with media company TOGETHXR to encourage more women to watch and play women’s sports.

Finally, Strava announced a new family subscription plan. As with the Student Plan, the objective is to make it easier to jump into exercise, this time sharing the annual subscription with a maximum of three other people (who can be family or simply friends or members of our community). It will offer a discount compared to the classic subscription, and will expand globally at the end of the year.