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🚀 Question about updating activity descriptions using the Strava API

  • March 14, 2025
  • 1 reply
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Hello, we are developing a third-party service using the Strava API.

đź“Ś Scenario:
Our service:

  • Receives activity creation/update events via Strava webhooks.
  • Then retrieves the activity data and updates the activity description by appending our service's content.

⚠️ Problem:
After receiving the webhook, we retrieve the activity data and update the description.
However, we occasionally encounter the following issues:

  • Our description update is not reflected.
  • Descriptions added by other third-party services disappear.

To address this, we introduced a 4 to 5-second delay before fetching activity data, but the same issue still happens intermittently.

âť“ Questions:

  1. What is the recommended approach to prevent description conflicts when multiple third-party services update an activity simultaneously?

We would appreciate it if you could share any official guidelines or best practices related to this.

Thank you! 🙏

Best answer by Jan_Mantau

I don’t think there are official guidelines, this is a “last one wins” situation. It doesn’t even have to be more than one third party app that causes the problem, also the user starting to edit the activity and meanwhile a third party app edits the activity too can lead to losing modifications.

The delay is one approach to make it more probable that adding something to the description is not lost but with that many third party apps out there and that often they need a long time between getting the old description and sending the new one Strava should be creating a new endpoint that only adds to existing descriptions but doesn’t overwrite them.

The only thing that really works currently is when the user has something like a button in the third party app to add missing descriptions at any time in case they got lost.

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Jan_Mantau
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  • March 14, 2025

I don’t think there are official guidelines, this is a “last one wins” situation. It doesn’t even have to be more than one third party app that causes the problem, also the user starting to edit the activity and meanwhile a third party app edits the activity too can lead to losing modifications.

The delay is one approach to make it more probable that adding something to the description is not lost but with that many third party apps out there and that often they need a long time between getting the old description and sending the new one Strava should be creating a new endpoint that only adds to existing descriptions but doesn’t overwrite them.

The only thing that really works currently is when the user has something like a button in the third party app to add missing descriptions at any time in case they got lost.


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