In October 2025, Strava hosted its inaugural Developer Summit at its San Francisco headquarters. It pulled together indie developers, teams from major tech companies, and leaders from top cycling, running, and fitness brands for a day of panels, networking, and the 2025 Strava App Awards.
With over 175,000 developers now building on Strava's API, 25,000 of them in the past year alone, the summit signaled a renewed bet on the ecosystem that has pushed Strava well beyond its core app.
Panels & Discussions
The summit featured three panel discussions exploring different aspects of building on Strava's platform.
Gamified Exploration
Ben Lowe of VeloViewer and Jim Chevalier of CityStrides discussed how gamification gets people out exploring. Both apps have built devoted communities around one idea: turning every road into a challenge. VeloViewer does it with Explorer Tiles, CityStrides with street-completion tracking.
Inside the Wahoo Integration
Wahoo CEO Gareth Joyce and pro cyclist Alison Tetrick dug into how hardware integrations shape training. They walked through how connected fitness devices have evolved and why deep integrations are now table stakes for any serious training hardware.
The Making of Runna
Dom Maskell (CEO) and Walter Holohan (CTO) of Runna shared their journey from building custom training plans to their acquisition by Strava earlier in 2025. For developers wondering how a Strava integration might grow into something bigger, their story was a pretty clear roadmap.
The 2025 Strava App Awards
The summit culminated in the Strava App Awards, recognizing standout integrations across the developer community. Three apps were named App of the Year in different categories, with a fourth honored as the Up & Coming App:
2025 Strava App Award Winners
AI-powered app that humorously roasts your Strava profile and training data
The gold standard for cycling data visualization, with Explorer Tiles and 3D climb profiles
Gamified exploration that tracks every road you've traveled and inspires new adventures
Analyzes your music listening patterns during workouts to find your best performance songs
Community Motivation: Roast My Strava
This category could have gone to any number of serious training tools. Instead Strava honored Roast My Strava, an AI-powered app that playfully mocks your training data. Created by Jason Kuperberg as a weekend side project, the app has been used by tens of thousands of athletes and went viral on social media as users shared screenshots of their personalized roasts.
The award says something about Strava's ecosystem. It isn't all performance optimization. Sometimes the best app is the one that makes you laugh at yourself. A question ("what if AI could roast your Strava profile?") turned into something tens of thousands of people shared, and it showed that your data can be a source of connection, not just competition.
Data Analysis: VeloViewer
VeloViewer, described at the summit as "the gold standard for cycling data visualization," won for years of making training data both good-looking and genuinely useful. Founded by Ben Lowe in 2012, right as Strava was catching on with cyclists, VeloViewer has grown from a personal project into a tool that weekend riders and WorldTour pro teams both rely on.
The Explorer Tiles feature splits the world into a grid of squares and turns filling them in into a game, which has nudged a lot of riders down roads they'd never have found otherwise. Its 3D climb profiles show up all over pro cycling broadcasts too, on Eurosport coverage since 2015. In 2016, VeloViewer became an Official Supplier to Team Sky.
Games & Optimizations: Wandrer
Wandrer, created by Craig Durkin, won for turning every ride and run into an adventure. It tracks which roads you've already covered and turns the rest into a game, which gets people hunting for new routes and poking around corners of their own cities they'd never ridden.
What began in 2018 as an art project called "All of ITP" (tracking roads inside Atlanta's Interstate 285) has grown into a global platform built around fitness as exploration. If you're sick of the same training loops, Wandrer is the nudge to turn left instead of right.
Up & Coming App: TrackTunes
The Up & Coming App Award went to TrackTunes, which launched just six months before the summit in May 2025. It looks at what you listen to during workouts and helps you figure out which songs show up in your best efforts.
Going from "hey, wouldn't it be cool to see what music people run to" to an award at Strava's headquarters in six months is the kind of run you get when you build something the community actually wants.
A Renewed Investment in Developers
The summit is a turning point for Strava's developer relations. The last formal recognition before this was the 2016 Developer Challenge, when Pace Match and Toolbox for Strava took top honors. Nearly a decade later, the ecosystem has grown to over 175,000 developers.
Under CEO Michael Martin, who joined in January 2024, developer relations have become a priority. Over half of Strava's 180+ million users are connected to apps powered by the API, which makes the third-party ecosystem central to what the platform is worth. The message from the summit was clear: the first Developer Summit won't be the last.
For anyone building on Strava's API, the 2025 summit was equal parts inspiration and validation. The winners cover a lot of ground: enterprise-grade visualization tools, weekend side projects, serious training analytics, and apps that exist mostly to make you smile. The thread between them is that they each extend what Strava can do and they get what athletes actually want.