Strava Overhauls How Runners Find and Follow Routes

Strava has rebuilt the way its app helps people find somewhere new to run, and the feature many runners will care about most is still on its way. On Thursday the company rolled out a new search in the app’s Maps tab, a larger library of routes, redesigned route cards and an offline mode, and said turn-by-turn audio directions for subscribers would follow, though it gave no date.

The spoken directions will cover runs, walks and hikes. Subscribers can already follow a planned route on their phone’s map and get an alert when they wander off it, but nothing has told them out loud where to turn, which is a real limitation once the phone is zipped into a belt or strapped to an arm. Komoot, one of Strava’s main rivals among route-planning apps, already offers turn-by-turn voice navigation, free in the first region a user downloads and paid beyond it.

For now, search is the biggest change. Typing a route name or a landmark into the Maps tab brings up matching routes, and Strava says the tool is built to cope with everyday phrasing instead of needing exact keywords. Behind it sits a bigger catalog of routes, which Strava says it has curated more carefully. Each one opens on a card with pictures and activity stats from people who have already been out on it, so a runner gets some idea of what a loop looks like and who uses it before committing to one.

Trail runners and anyone heading beyond the reach of a cell tower will probably get more out of the offline changes. With no signal, the app now puts saved routes on its home screen, and a run can be recorded with no connection at all and sent up to Strava when the phone picks up signal again.

Beyond the audio directions, Strava did not spell out which of Thursday’s features need a subscription. When it released a hiking-focused update in June, it listed route discovery, saved routes, offline routes and off-route alerts as subscriber features, while following a route on an Apple Watch and syncing routes to Garmin, Apple Watch and Coros devices stayed free. A subscription costs $11.99 a month or $79.99 a year in the U.S., and the family plan is $139.99 a year.

Strava bought the training app Runna in 2025 and now sells a combined Strava and Runna plan for $149.99 a year. The company says it has more than 200 million users in more than 185 countries, up from the 195 million it cited at the end of June, and it filed confidentially for an IPO in January.

Tags and descriptions drawn from users’ own activities, pointing out what lies along a route, are due alongside the audio directions, as is a way to look through routes and explore the map on Strava’s website. Routes are also heading to more watches. Strava said in July that its Routes feature would come to Samsung’s Galaxy Watch through Samsung Health for subscribers, with the rollout starting in the coming months.