Strava adds support for iPhone-free running & biking with GPS on Apple Watch Series 2

Can any app developers help me understand why it would take 6 months to add this feature? It seems like it wouldn't be a huge transition to pull data from the watch GPS instead of the phone GPS.  

As a side question does anyone have ideas as to why there is no Apple support for podcasts or audiobooks on the Apple Watch?  There's only one app so far that can do podcasts and it's a janky process.  

I'd love to leave my phone at home when I run every day and not just on race day.  I thought that day would come with the Series 2, but it hasn't so far.

greginprague said:

As a side question does anyone have ideas as to why there is no Apple support for podcasts or audiobooks on the Apple Watch?  There's only one app so far that can do podcasts and it's a janky process.  

I'd love to leave my phone at home when I run every day and not just on race day.  I thought that day would come with the Series 2, but it hasn't so far.

I don't understand this, either. It seems trivial since you can sync music to your Apple Watch and listen without your phone nearby.

Probably because podcast and audiobook apps are the kind of product Apple will very likely end up producing anyway, destroying, or at the least, severely limiting the market opportunity for third parties. So, want that kind of app on your watch, lobby Apple.

I would never consider going for a bike ride without my iPhone. Best safety device I own, this side of my helmet.

greginprague said:

Can any app developers help me understand why it would take 6 months to add this feature? It seems like it wouldn't be a huge transition to pull data from the watch GPS instead of the phone GPS.  

The watch automatically uses its GPS receiver if the phone isn't present, so there is very little change needed by the developer to handle that.  

My guess would be that the design of the watch app previously relied on the phone being present and doing some of processing.  This was quite a common approach because the first version of watchOS didn't even allow the app to run on the watch - most of the app had to run on the phone and pass data to the watch.  With watchOS 2 and 3 the app does run on the watch but not all of the functionality available in iOS is available in watchOS, so it is often still easier to leave some of the processing on the iPhone and send it to the watch.  Rewriting this functionality to run on the watch could be what has taken them so long.  It could have entailed a change to the fundamental architecture of the app from being split across the iPhone and the watch to running exclusively on the watch.

However this is all just guesswork as I know nothing about the Strava app!