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Dead-end with the Strava API because of no delete & upload

  • November 23, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 74 views

morbidel
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Hi all,

I develop a Strava App which aims to show a list of the recent Strava activities and you have the option of merging two or more activities selected from the list.

I see it as being very useful, for me of course, as I usually do a morning commute to work, lunch run, evening commute back home - all recorded with my watch. Since I cannot pause my bike activity to start a run, then later resume the bike activity (would be a nice feature btw - to allow multiple paused activities based on type), I want in the evening to be able to merge my 2 commute activities into one.

Algorithm I use for merging is plain simple - just aggregate all points from all activities, sorted by date.

Everything is in place and working locally, however I have reached a dead lock:

  • my initial plan was to download original activities (as GPX) and delete the activities-to-be merged; however this is not possible as there’s no way of deleting an activity via the Strava API; the the upload of the merged activity will follow
  • since I cannot delete, I try the upload of the merged even if its parts are on Strava; upload basically enqueues the track then polls for this upload status; not much to my surprise, upload fails after a while with "There was an error processing your activity." and “…  duplicate of ...”. Basically upload fails as it found that there is an activity starting around the starting date of my new-to-merge activity’s start time (which of course I set at starting time of first activity to be merged)

Question is - how can I - via the Strava API - be able to get over this dead lock? I cannot upload due to an existing activity and in the meantime I cannot remove that activity.

 

Best regards,

Best answer by Jan_Mantau

You don’t have good options with the API, at least as long the proposal 

 is not implemented and it doesn’t look as if Strava is prone to fulfil any requests from this hub.

 

The problems with the duplicate should be solvable, if you don’t reuse the original ids in the activity files and maybe tweak the start time slightly. There would be trial and error involved as Strava doesn’t reveal what exactly the parameters are for recognizing duplicates. I can only say that when I record parallel with two devices Strava does not identify duplicates even if the starting and ending times are near identical.

If you only use it for your own activities you could to try fiddle with the website to emulate a delete click but we’re not in a reliable and documented realm anymore.

 

 

2 replies

Jan_Mantau
Superuser
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  • Superuser
  • Answer
  • November 24, 2025

You don’t have good options with the API, at least as long the proposal 

 is not implemented and it doesn’t look as if Strava is prone to fulfil any requests from this hub.

 

The problems with the duplicate should be solvable, if you don’t reuse the original ids in the activity files and maybe tweak the start time slightly. There would be trial and error involved as Strava doesn’t reveal what exactly the parameters are for recognizing duplicates. I can only say that when I record parallel with two devices Strava does not identify duplicates even if the starting and ending times are near identical.

If you only use it for your own activities you could to try fiddle with the website to emulate a delete click but we’re not in a reliable and documented realm anymore.

 

 


morbidel
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  • Author
  • Hub Rookie
  • November 24, 2025

Hi Jan,

 

Thanks for the answer. That was what my AI Agent was suggesting also - fiddle a bit the timestamps and/or the gps coordinates.

Was just curious about other options as well.

The Delete via API I think they don’t want to implement due to security concerns/potential abuse - I wouldn’t wait for it anyway.

 

Cheers,