I started up the app today and was greeted by a routes interface that is somehow even worse than the previous version.
It preserves aspect of the route builder that I disliked the most: it seems to simply use other people's routes to suggest one for you instead of generating something truly novel. This means it typically won't take you anywhere new most of the time, and simply regurgitates an unchanging list composed mostly of other people's routes, as opposed to actually suggesting new routes, stringing together segments, using your own heatmap, etc. When I select a 15-30 km trail run, how can it only find one route? There are hundreds of segments and dozens of trails in my city, if this were truly working as a route generator, surely it could find more than one!
I could be misunderstanding how this works, but the explanation on the Strava site of how the routes feature works is a bit opaque and doesn't really explain much about how these routes are generated, so it's hard to know exactly what's going on behind the scenes, but the fact remains that the end result is, in my opinion, actually very poor for what I would guess most people want: suggesting a NEW route. I want to discover new places and hit new segments. Not re-use routes from other people!
And now it seems quite intent on suggesting routes that not only have all these weaknesses, but are also utterly useless to me. About half of the routes suggested now start somewhere other than my current location or where I drop a pin. This is very frustrating!
Who exactly is this new routes feature for? I admit that having all the suggested routes visualized on the map is a nice change, but in overall this feature is far worse than before, which is really saying something. The routes are worse than before, the interface is still bad (though marginally better), and there is STILL no route generator for desktop.
