Strava Route Explorer

Symfony, MySQL and GCP-powered social app to share Strava cycling and running routes.

Strava Route Explorer was my long-term pet project for athletes (mainly cyclists and runners - including me!) who use Strava to create and use routes for their training rides and runs.

The idea? Sync routes from your Strava account, and then browse and search all routes synced by you and all other athletes.

A feature Strava once had, but then took it down, making it impossible to search for local routes created by other athletes anymore.

There were Route Builder, Global Heatmap and Local City Guides - which were all great, but still there was no way to easily search for interesting routes in the area made and tested by other athletes. Even though everyone and their dog has been asking for it for years.

This app was supposed to help with this issue, by allowing athletes to synchronize their selected routes into a catalog accessible and searchable by other athletes authorized with Strava.

Once synchronized, athletes were able to explore all routes already synchronized by other athletes, either just paging through the full list, or searching by their name, distance, total ascent, start and/or end start/end point location, author etc.

And it has become popular. So popular in fact that it ruffled Strava's feathers, and was met with their take down notice for alleged copyright infringements, followed by DMCA complaints from Google and Cloudflare, even though it followed Strava's T&Cs to the letter.

And never mind the others, but when Google threatens you with taking down not only your GCP, but also your whole Google account, and with it a big chunk of your online life, you just (have to) submit. 🤷‍♂️

Tech