In mid-June I cancelled my subscription, as I’ve often done before. I did the monthly free ride about ten days later and found that the font rendering regression on Apple TV made the GUI unbearable for me, so I felt no hurry getting back on. Last weekend I talked to a Zwift mate about a common acquaintance who seems to have disappeared from Zwift entirely. Given the global circumstances, that is discomforting, so I thought I’d check on that in the Companion app. That was last Tuesday.
When I opened the app, there was no data at all. No activities, no profile avatar, no followers, nothing. I logged in on the website, same thing there. The only data that is left is my user name and password. I promptly received the welcome e-mail for new users, and subsequently the automated noise about installing the companion app, setting up your trainer, and all that.
Even though I’m quite used to the, let’s call it casual, local QA culture, that’s a lot of data to misplace. Level 50. 49.000 km horizontal. 500 km vertical. All route badges. 5 vEverestings. I joined Michael Knudsen for half his Indoor RAAM. And so on.
There is a reason why my reaction to this is overwhelmingly calm, though.
In spring 2019, Zwift had erroneously deleted my account completely. At that time, I was about one third into a prepaid promo RCC year subscription, and had just started a WBR fund raiser for which I had pledged six vEverestings. Creating a fresh account without access to the Alpe du Zwift was not exactly how I saw that meet a happy ending. During the follwowing months, my account was painstakingly recreated by Zwift developers with a lot of manual work. In a way I was pretty lucky that the Zwift Power activity data was still there. Sometimes, decentralization is for the better. The only thing that was never resolved was the ability to download activity fit files from before the incident, because the AWS UUIDs technically belong to another user.
My relation with the platform was admittedly never quite the same after that. And I feel rather sorry now for the poor sap(s) who have done all the annoying data restauration work in 2019. Although I’ve been told that they learned a lot about their platform in the proces.
Everybody but @shooj, enjoy your weekend.