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Section 5.16 clarification — twice flagged as "abstraction layer," need to understand what to fix

  • July 28, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 59 views

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Hi Strava team and fellow developers,

 

I run RunMirror (Client ID 8313), a small personal app on Standard Tier. It shows a runner their own running history back to themselves — lifetime miles, milestones, and a mile-by-mile view of their own past races. Direct OAuth integration. Each athlete sees only their own data. Nothing shared between athletes, no public feed, no leaderboard. All insights are computed by my own rule-based logic — no AI/LLM anywhere in the product.

 

I organically filled all 10 Standard Tier slots with runners from my own circle, and I'd like a Standard Tier growth review to raise the athlete cap to 100 so a few more people can connect.

 

I've submitted twice and both times received a response citing API Policy Section 5.16 (abstraction layers / intermediaries). I've reviewed my setup carefully against that section:

 

- It's a direct integration — no third-party intermediary platform routing Strava data.

- No re-exposure of Strava data to third parties; each athlete only ever sees their own.

- I removed an internal admin view I'd been using to monitor my own athletes, in case that aggregation read as re-exposure.

 

My question: Could a staff member help me understand what specifically is being read as a "5.16 abstraction layer" so I can fix the actual issue rather than keep guessing? Even a one-line pointer — whether it's something in the app, the integration, or how I described it — would let me correct the right thing and resubmit properly.

 

Happy to provide any detail. Thanks for the help.

 

— Balaji

2 replies

Jan_Mantau
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  • Hub Powerhouse
  • July 28, 2026

My wild guess is that their reviews are automatically done by a rather inept AI which uses the word “Mirror” in your app name as indication that contrary to subitem c) in 5.16 you share tokens across multiple servers.


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  • Author
  • Hub Rookie
  • July 30, 2026

Thank you, Jan_Mantau — that's a sharper guess than anything I'd landed on, and it's a little painful because "Mirror" here just means a reflective mirror of your own running, nothing to do with data mirroring or proxying. No shared tokens, no multi-server mirroring — each athlete's token only ever fetches that athlete's own data. If a classifier is reading the name as infrastructure "mirroring," that's a genuinely unfortunate collision.

Is there a staff member who could confirm whether it's the name, or something else, that's triggering 5.16? I'd rather fix the actual thing than keep guessing. Really appreciate you taking the time.