Strava Is Making Its Most Popular Safety Feature Free for Everyone

Running security isn’t any joke, and whereas most corporations lock superior options behind paywalls, Strava introduced immediately it’ll make its reside location-sharing function Beacon free for everybody.

How Beacon works: When you report a exercise, you possibly can select to ship security contacts textual content messages with a hyperlink. Those individuals can then see your present location in actual time, your previous areas, in addition to the place you began recording. Once you’ve completed, they’ll be notified that you simply’re performed. You also can manually textual content a hyperlink to somebody, no matter whether or not they have the Strava app.

If it sounds too good to be true, there’s one small catch. The free model of the Beacon function would require you to hold your cellphone to work. Strava does supply this function from related units—a Garmin or Apple Watch, as an example—however these will stay behind a paywall. Strava says that’s due to the “added complexity of supporting those integrations.”

Still, opening up security options to everyone seems to be all the time transfer. This is particularly true now, as extra individuals have taken up outside train in the course of the pandemic. The firm says that amongst its customers, the variety of solo marathons tripled in 2020 compared to 2019. Meanwhile, the variety of recorded outside walks additionally tripled, and general, Strava members elevated outside actions by 28%.

This Strava transfer follows two latest updates that made it simpler for customers to lock down what train routine info was publicly shared within the Strava app. The updates enable each free and paid customers to customise which metrics had been proven to followers, in addition to tweak the visibility of their GPS maps.

In the age of related health, it’s turn into extremely commonplace to submit your routes on-line. However, as enjoyable and motivating as that may be, it’s additionally freakishly simple for stalkers to be taught somewhat too a lot in the event you’re not cautious. A 2019 Runner’s World survey additionally discovered that 84% of ladies reported experiencing “some kind of harassment that left them feeling unsafe” throughout an out of doors run. Logging miles is difficult sufficient with out security issues, so kudos to Strava for doing the proper factor by making this function extra accessible—and never a privilege it’s important to pay for.