I have recently seen three examples of duplicate rides on Strava, owing to the rider recording the ride both on s conventional Garmin, and also on a wristwatch device.
Usually, Strava normally doesn’t allow duplicate rides. I thin, however, there is a logical gap in their thinking – each ride has a unique serial number, and if Strava sees the same serial number it won’t accept it again.
But the same ride on two DIFFERENT devices will have, I’m sure, two different serial numbers so Strava accepts it. It doesn’t make its judgement, it seems, on the CONTENT of the ride (time and location coordinates) which would be harder to program – so i guess they haven’t bothered.
Strava used to have a restriction on when pictures could be uploaded to a ride, on the basis of some misplaced strategy to make sure people didn’t forge ride pictures!!
But it seems they haven’t even got the basics right!! They obviously need some consultancy on this…see my previous article at www.briansutton.uk on merging rides for a bit (lot) more in this kind of area.
Suffice to say that when merging two rides (recorded in two successive parts on two different devices owing to battery life issues) you have to randomise the serial number of the merged ride. Otherwise it inherits the serial number of one of the component part rides, and won’t upload because Strava spots the duplicate serial number.