Hey everyone đź‘‹
I build an indie swim-tracking app for iPhone and Apple Watch. My Strava integration hit the athlete cap very soon (10 athletes), and the capacity increase application has now been rejected twice, both times with the standard "we can't provide individual feedback" email. So I'm hoping the community (or someone from the API team 🙏) can help me figure out what's wrong.
What the integration does:
- Uploads swims as structured activities, one lap per set (warm-up / main / cool-down) with pace, SWOLF, pool length, and heart rate. The goal is that swims land in the Strava feed richer than a raw import.
- Reads back the athlete's own swim totals to show a few swim-specific insights Strava's all-sports profile doesn't surface.
Compliance-wise: minimum scopes (read + activity:write), all API calls server-side, webhooks for deauth instead of polling, cached reads, official Connect with Strava button, no social features, no showing anyone else's data, no AI touching Strava data, and the integration is free for all users.
The first rejection presumably came down to "complementary experience". Fair, I was upload-only back then. So I built the structured uploads and the read-back insights specifically to address that... and got the same form letter again.
Questions:
- Has anyone actually been approved for a capacity increase since the June 2026 tier changes? What made the difference?
- Does the application itself matter more than the integration, demo video, screenshots of the activity in Strava?
- Any feedback about what I am missing?
Happy to share details if anyone's willing to take a look. I’d rather fix the real issue than keep resubmitting blind. Thanks!
