Why this smartwatch is more popular than Garmin for Strava runners

After managing to outsell the Swiss Watch market in recent years, the Apple Watch is making its presence felt in the sports watch arena too.

Hugely popular sports app Strava recently released the 2024 edition of its Year of Sport: Trend Report and revealed that the Apple Watch was a top upload device on the platform.

The report, which crunched user data from activities uploaded from 1 September 2023 to August 30th 2024, pulled out data on the most popular smartwatches used to upload activities. The Apple Watch Series grabbed the top spot for uploads of running activities, with the Apple Watch SE in second place and the Garmin Forerunner 245 in third.

Interestingly, there was no mention of a Google Wear OS smartwatch such as the Pixel Watch 3, which says something about Google and its hardware partner’s attempts to get its sports tracking up to scratch.

There was a Garmin watch in that top spot for the 2023 edition of Strava’s annual report where it only revealed the most popular upload device. That was the Garmin Forerunner 235, the predecessor to the Forerunner 245. The presence of the Apple Watch this time above Garmin will be music to the ears of those at Apple HQ and not so much for Garmin and other more established sports watch makers.

As someone who’s tested pretty much every Apple Watch since the very first – and that includes the latest Watch Ultra 2 and Watch Series 10 – it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that Apple’s smartwatch is getting a lot of kudos on Strava. Especially when you look at some of the other data captured in Strava’s report.

Why the Apple Watch wins for runners

Running is well and truly having a moment and according to Strava, it is the fastest growing social sport on the platform. It’s bringing people to the sport that normally wouldn’t think to join others for an evening or morning 5km jaunt. Strava states that running clubs were up 59% on the previous year. Strava also stated that that 5k runners tended to opt for an Apple Watch with those tackling longer distances strapping on a Garmin instead.

Having joined a fair few runs hosted by run clubs over the last few years and seen those clubs flood my Instagram feed this year I know that a lot of these club runs tend to max out at the 5k distance mark. Having glanced around at the wrists of a lot of these runners, the Apple Watch does seem to dominate. When I’ve stepped on the line of a half marathon or marathon race, there’s definitely been a fair few more Garmins.

For the casual or new runner who’s caught the running or run club bug, I can see why the Apple Watch would be a natural fit. One thing Apple has in its favour over dedicated running watches is the ease of using them to track a run or a workout.

Especially if you’re turning to the native Workout app to do that. Apple’s Watches are now more capable watches than ever for monitoring your exercise, but it’s also easy to bypass its more advanced features like building custom interval workouts or using the virtual pacer to keep that experience a simpler one.

If you’ve not gone full runner yet, the Apple Watch does a great balancing act of workout tracking and being useful outside of workouts. The two Watch elements work in tandem as opposed to feeling a more disjointed experience.

This is where most sports watches and other smartwatches are playing catch up with Apple with that seamless ability to go from capturing your lunchtime run to effortlessly switching into work mode or doing things like taking control of your workout playlist.

Mike Sawh

Apple Watches are also just good at tracking runs reliably. That’s especially true of the last few generations of the Watch Series as well as the Series SE. My general running and race tests with the Apple Watch Ultra and Series 10 particularly have shown that Apple also has a watch to rival the very best sports watches for areas like GPS accuracy and tracking metrics like heart rate.

Another factor here is that Apple is shipping more watches than Garmin and other watch brands, which means there are simply more Apple Watches on people’s wrists. Back in August of this year, market analysis firm Canalys revealed data on worldwide shipments of smartwatches in Q2 2024 where Apple had a 49% share of the market with Samsung taking 15% and Garmin next with 11%. 

Does it now mean that the Apple Watch is the go-to watch for runners and Garmin’s future is doomed? Well, not quite, but it’s more evidence of its progress to turn its smartwatch into a genuine sports watch alternative. If an iPhone owner were now to ask me if there is a smartwatch that’s good enough to track runs, I’d happily recommend the Apple Watch, which wouldn’t have been the case had we been talking about the Apple Watch Series 5 or older.

As Strava’s report suggests, Garmin is still favoured for longer-distance runs. Battery life will undeniably be a factor here, plus the richer training and analysis features on offer straight out of the box on most dedicated running watches that sit in and around the price of Apple’s Watch range. This upload data also just covers running, with cycling activity uploads dominated by Garmin devices.

The data will simply put brands that have made it their business to track indoor and outdoor workouts more on notice that whether it’s the casual fitness fan or the more seasoned one, Apple is making its mark and no longer lags behind the competition.

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