🔗 Rouvy Adds Zwift Cog/Click/Ride Virtual Shifting: Battle Royale Begins?

Rouvy has just done what everyone has been asking for: Added virtual shifting to Rouvy, using Zwift hardware*. This allows you to use virtual shifting in Rouvy, just the same as Zwift, using the Zwift Click or Zwift Ride hardware. You technically don’t need the Zwift Cog at all, leaving your existing regular cassette on there. But we’re probably getting ahead of ourselves.

This announcement is a pretty big deal. Over the last year or two, Zwift has heavily pushed not just consumers but trainer manufacturers, to adopt Zwift Cog & Click. In fact, almost every trainer manufacturer except Garmin/Tacx has fallen in line. And while Zwift Cog & Click does have some substantial benefits for multi-bike compatibility (for both consumers and Zwift), its main downside is that Zwift has heavily guarded this as Zwift-only. Thus, anyone who bought a Zwift Cog-enabled trainer was effectively locked into Zwift from an app standpoint.

By Rouvy removing that wall, this means consumers can buy any trainer they please, and use it with not just Zwift, but also Rouvy (and I’m gonna guess, soon, any other app they darn well want). Now, to be really clear here: This is hardly some olive-branch move by Zwift to the indoor training community. Rouvy has done the engineering work of reverse engineering the communications of the Zwift Protocol, and simply implemented it in Rouvy. So, let’s dive into it.

*Now, for a tiny bit of nitpickers corner, technically speaking, a small independent app called QZ has added this a while back for other platforms, but that requires a bunch of middle-man configuration and another app. Which isn’t an insult to that app (they also do treadmill incline stuff too), but that’s much more of a geekery shim/solution than a mainstream solution.