Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from AlternativeTo

It's been a pretty exciting year for AlternativeTo. We are finally starting to see the end of our major stack migration. Now more or less the entire site is using a modern Next.js frontend and a .Net Core backend. A few parts of the site still remain in the old setup, mainly lists and some login / account features. The login stuff will be migrated first thing in January and lists, hopefully within the first quarter next year.

So, what happened on AlternativeTo in 2022?

We spent a lot of time migrating our forms for adding and editing apps to our new stack, and when we did, we also introduced a few features. Mainly the ability to add what languages an app supports and to specify a detailed OSS license. We also built a feature to import data from GitHub and Apple's App Store to be able to populate a form quickly but also to provide information like what programming languages are used, app store ratings, when the latest release of the app was and so on. Just make sure to add a GitHub link or Apple App Store link and this data will be populated. Feel free to suggest more data sources we should add, and before you ask, Google Play doesn't have any good public API.

Another focus area this year has been features and tags. Late last year, we introduced what we called Applications Types to better categorize applications and improve our filters. This year, we added Highlighted Features. It's a set of tags with a short description and some “logic” to better explain what a feature is and to give you an easier way to see what features an app has or doesn't have.

And of course, we changed our layout and color scheme! We have already talked about that in a recent blog post, but it was a big project, where we finally added a dark mode, among other cool features.

And the plan for the future…

I've already mentioned that we still have some stuff to migrate to our new stack. And apart from that, it's always hard to make promises. But some things we have planned to focus on next year are:

• News, we want to improve our news section and make it more intelligent and more connected with apps and categories. We will share more details when we start, but we are kind of excited about this.
• Improve what we already started, I have mentioned app types, highlighted features and other app metadata in this post. We will use them to build smarter ways of finding alternatives and comparing apps.
• Community! We want it to be more fun to contribute to the site, give you more feedback and rewards for you guys. You are the ones who share your knowledge and help others find the best software possible.

And with that said, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 🎄