Snapchat has launched a brand-new AR integration with fitness tracking app Strava. This will provide an augmented reality experience that enables Strava users to share their fitness progress with friends and family via Snapchat.

What Is Strava?

Strava is a fitness app aimed towards mainly running, hiking, and biking enthusiasts. Its name comes from the Swedish verb “to strive,” so it puts the focus on tracking your progress and improving performance.

Strava markets itself as a community-focused app for athletes. While it doesn’t boast a particularly large userbase, it holds its own against other social fitness platforms, with over 100 million registered users. And, even though athletes are the main focus, anyone who's keen to get serious about their training can use Strava.

How Snapchat's Strava Integration Works

The new integration combines data from Strava directly with your Snapchat camera display. This helps create interactive visual updates of your fitness activity and progress. In a post on the Snap Newsroom, Snap explains:

With a few taps, the Strava Activity Lens allows Snapchatters to take a Snap or post a Story that instantly tells the tale of recent workouts. Whether you’re walking around the city with friends or training for your next race, this AR experience helps you better tell the story of every effort on Snapchat.

But relaying a story visually is not just a point-and-shoot process. You can also creatively edit your story or Snap with the many Snapchat stickers and filters available, or other options such as music.

On Snapchat, you can find the new Lens integration on your Lens Explorer. Your most recent workouts will appear there, along with the different activities you can toggle through.

Why Is Snapchat Collaborating With Strava?

While Snapchat continues to be a popular social media platform, it has experienced difficulties of late. A sharp fall in its stock price due to the global economic downturn plus massive layoffs have left the company reeling.

As a result, Snapchat will be keen targeting new users and demographics to try and offset the effects of these setbacks. One way to do this could be to onboard more 30- to 40-year-olds, a much smaller group compared to Snapchat’s younger users.

By funneling more users into its Map and Spotlight sections, Snapchat highlights its value propositions; the features that make Snapchat unique. This is a bid to become harder to copy, more resilient to competition, and increase the opportunities for longer-term monetization.

It also means that Snap is attempting to conquer new territories. Its traditional audience groups are younger (13-25 year-olds), but focusing on that group alone won’t help Snapchat grow.

What Does the Snapchat-Strava Collaboration Mean for Users?

It means that more millennials and older users could join Snapchat in large numbers. These generations take their fitness very seriously, almost as much as Gen Z users, who typically work out several times a week.

But, if all goes as Snapchat appears to be planning, its integration with Strava will bring more 30- to 40-year-olds into the app. Over time, this may cause the average user age to trend a bit higher.

It might also encourage Snapchat to target older users with new monetization opportunities and incentives, since they usually have more disposable income to spend.

In the end, the main focus is for users to share their fitness journey with their family and friends using Snapchat’s many features.

Would You Use Snapchat to Track Your Fitness?

While Snapchat isn’t the first platform that pops to mind when it comes to fitness, that could be about to change. A new influx of more mature and experienced users into the app could also increase the possibility of novel features and ideas.

Whether you choose to opt in or not, it seems Snapchat is ready to break new ground.