- Mystery Run
- Strava
Mystery Run and Strava
Connect Strava and the runs you finish in Mystery Run post to your feed, with the drawing in the title. This page covers exactly what the connection does.
Mystery Run is an iPhone app that guides you, turn by turn, along a route that secretly draws a picture on the map. You find out what you drew when you finish.
If you connect Strava, the finished run goes to your Strava account like any other activity: the route on the map, your distance, time and pace, titled with the drawing, like Butterfly 🦋 via Mystery Run.
The details
- What Mystery Run asks Strava for
- One permission: to upload activities to your account. Strava also shares your public profile with every app you connect, as it always does. Mystery Run doesn't ask to read your activities, your private data or your followers, so it can't.
- What it posts
- Only runs you save with the Upload to Strava switch on, which it is by default once you're connected. Each upload is a run with its GPS track and times, the distance, and the title and description from the save screen.
- When it posts
- Right after you save. If you finish without signal, the upload waits on your phone and goes through the next time you open the app with a connection. The same run never posts twice.
- Where your Strava sign-in goes
- You sign in on Strava's own page. Strava requires a secret key that can't safely live inside an app, so the sign-in finishes at a small server of mine on Amazon Web Services. It swaps Strava's one-time code for your access tokens and hands them straight to your phone, which keeps them in its keychain. The server has no database and keeps nothing.
- How to disconnect
- In the app, go to Settings, then Strava, then Disconnect Strava. You can also revoke Mystery Run on Strava's site under Settings, then My Apps. Runs you already posted stay on Strava until you delete them there.
- Do I need Strava to use Mystery Run?
- No. Without it, runs are saved in the app with the drawing, distance and pace, and you can share a card of your art to Instagram Stories, Messages or anywhere else.
Questions about the connection go to jasontgirouard@gmail.com, and the privacy policy covers it in full. Mystery Run is an independent app, not made by or affiliated with Strava.
You'll see it when you've run it
Free to download on iPhone.