Strava finally gave Apple Watch users a WorkOutdoors-style feature they’ve been missing from the Workout app for years

• Strava has released a new feature for Apple Watch, allowing you to view and follow a pre-generated route map
• This allows you to display a map on your wrist and follow a route, ensuring you travel a precise distance and don’t get lost.
• This is a feature that other apps like AllTrails and other watches like Garmin have offered for years.

As Techradar’s senior fitness and wearables editor, I test smartwatches of all kinds. However, on a daily basis, I usually wear Garmin. There are several reasons for this, but the biggest is that I’m a regular runner and Garmin offers one of the most comprehensive suites of running features of any of the different categories of wearables. Notably, many of the best Garmin watches let you generate routes in the Garmin Connect app, sync them to your watch, and follow a color map on your wrist.

Users of even the best Apple Watches can’t do this, at least not natively within Apple’s own workout app. You need to switch apps from Workout to Maps, run Workout in the background, and have a destination or route preloaded in the Maps app. It’s frustrating and annoying.