[nradov]

It's just really tough to compete in the fitness tech market. The total addressable market size isn't huge. And over the last few years Garmin has thrown tremendous resources into it and launched so many new products that smaller competitors were squeezed out. Wahoo, Suunto, Coros, and Polar are still hanging on with small market shares in devices and Strava may survive as an independent app. Nike tried and gave up. Fitbit was slowly dying and got rescued by a Google acquisition. But anyone else is going to have to come up with a real disruptive innovation to have a chance of long term survival.

[762236]

It is tough. One of the nice things about the Garmin universe is that they have a foundation of open standards that help with interoperability and forward continuity if parts of that universe close. The FIT file format is open. The ANT+ protocol is open I believe, but devices can also use BLE which is open. If I preserve all of my FIT files, and Strava decided to close down, I could upload them all to Training Peaks or an alternative site. I've already written my own analysis software which didn't require permission from any website for access to my data. My Garmin device gives me access to the FIT files without requiring a cloud service.

[nradov]

The ANT+ protocol and FIT file format are sort of open. They are well documented and available to everyone. Multiple independent companies do contribute. But ultimately they are controlled by Garmin; they aren't true open standards like WiFi, TCP/IP, or HTML.

https://www.thisisant.com/

[ISL]

Agreed. When I have tried to work with it [1], the format has been anything but open. It's been a mixture of other people's libraries and reverse-engineering to make Garmin files work for my needs.

There is an SDK with a license agreement that is probably more descriptive, but the license terms are not what one expects from measurement instrumentation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15825838

[braythwayt]

Not to mention how much of that market is being bled off by Apple. Obviously, specialty tools are always going to have a market. But companies like Apple are going to capture more and more of the “mainstream” market with their own fitness offerings.

[robertjfclarke]

It's not entirely accurate to say that Nike gave up on apps. They still maintain a core shopping app, Strava competitor and one or two other niches: https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/nike-inc/id301521406#see...

[nradov]

Nike gave up on wearable devices. They used to sell their own fitness trackers and sensors.