I need to track cardio with terrain data, but I'd rather not trust Strava with my privacy. I know there are some alternatives, but which one is the most reliable and feature-rich? I don't have smart accessories, just and android phone. Preferably, I'd like an app that let's me track added weights for calorie purposes (like rucking).

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[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 5 points 6 months ago

Garmin is like the Apple of the fitness world. Very much not open source, but broadly privacy-respecting.

And like Apple, the reason they do this is because they don't make their money from data harvesting, they make it by selling high quality hardware at a premium. And depending on your perspective, either unlike Apple or to a much greater extent than Apple, Garmin pushes their hardware by artificially restricting their software. You can expect to get maybe one year of feature updates on your thousand dollar bike computer or running watch, and a few security updates after that. Some of those limitation might be because of genuine hardware limitations (e.g. my Forerunner 935 not getting Garmin Pay because it lacks an NFC chip), but many are purely because they want you to have as much incentive to upgrade as possible.