European alternatives to non-European apps (2.0)
European alternatives to non-European apps (2.0)
Version 2 of the European app alternatives. Feel free to share it :)
Took this post as motivation to try some out.
Here WeGo: actually pretty intuitive! Better than OSMand and Organic Maps in terms of Car Navigation (actual Voice and not TTS Voice from android) and 3D sounds that you have to get used to but coule make listening to instrucrions in stressfull sitations easier. Also optional: speeding warning ring sound and shield head up-sound effects (yield, stop, train crossing, etc.) Each with a special sound so you might get better prepared for the next yield or stop sign since your NAV app told ya already that one is coming up soon.
Deezer: Well some usability things annoy me. Also some problems with the android tv client...
Bit the flow mode (random shuffle in genres or moods (happy, party, chill...) that also has a toggle if you want the shuffle be based of songs you have in your playlists/liked already or if you want to go on a jurney to find new songs.
Pretty geat so far!
Qwant: well the search results hit good. Dark theme is a lil worse than DDG's dark theme but thats just preference. Some !bang searches are not available though. DDG has many more listed than Qwant. But we're getting there!
https://delta.chat is also European but is decentralized unlike threema which means you don’t rely on one company to keep the servers up or your communications stop working.
Peertube doesn't work
if you're considering Qobuz, it's amazing, and if you're a student it's quite affordable with their student plan.
unrelated tool, for more technical folks <3
searXNG
I wish there would be some good european LLMs for agentic coding..
Ecosia is a Bing proxy.
They are working on ditching Bing.
Aren't all these alternatives just Google or bing proxies?
Threema isn't. Anyway, it's a bad list. It's reminiscent of Russian "import replacement" lists which nobody takes seriously.
For mail I use mailo which is french. But I use a lot of other providers like disroot and my own email domain.
I didn't know Soundcloud was European. Been using them for a while, my only complaints are: lack of ability to report much of anything, lack of moderation, and a system that incentivizes poor quality uploads of popular songs to avoid automated detection.
If you let it autoplay after picking a popular song you might get a list of bangers or you might get sped up trash uploads with an unfortunate high pitch tone that I imagine must have been outside of the uploader's hearing range. Occasionally it plays some guy reading phonetic scripts like he's just learning to read for the first time for an hour, but it made it into the list because it's titled after a beatles song.
SoundCloud might be the single worst music platform out there, and that's saying a lot given that Spotify exists. The audio quality is awful, everything is expensive and they double and triple dip artists and listeners. Yet despite the exploitative monetisation, they don't seem to actually make any money and have almost gone bankrupt several times.
I certainly don't plan to pay them anything, that's for sure. I'm just out there looking for a stable mix of things I've never heard and some nostalgia, but very few and far between platforms do anything except reccomend the same bunch of songs that you've heard a thousand times before.
And also something that plays well on a mobile browser.
I recently discovered Monocles.eu, they are a privacy respecting email, chat (Matrix?), drive (Nextcloud?), social (Mastodon) and translator platform. I'm still forming my opinion, but they look good. In France, there's also the Chatons who propose local alternative hosting of many common services, such as Nextcloud, Mastodon, Matrix, Mattermost, VaultWarden, etc.
It's pretty telling that, as a European, I've literally not heard of any of those European alternatives.
It tells more about you. Deezer, Soundcloud, DeepL and Bolt are pretty popular globally.
That doesn't mean that they are subfunctional though.
Peertube has this fediverse problem. You google it, go to the webpage and instead of getting a list of promoted videos, you get an explanation of what it is and a manual on how to actually join, starting with „select a pot“. You then get to search the list of pots that all have like 10 viewers and 5gb upload limit. I stopped at this point.
That being said, i really would like an European youtube alternative, but not off the „provide your own hardware“ kind.
Exactly my problem why I'm not really getting into Lemmy either, same with mastodon. The whole decentralization standing in the middle of it all is just annoying.
Also yeah, Peertube did not even look like a competitor at all. Same with Threema with it costing 6 euros to use
Joinpeertube.org doesn’t have the best onboarding, but take a look at the pinned post at [email protected] for a few good servers to choose from.
Last time I checked ecosia gets it's search queries from Bing, just a heads up. Other than that I'd say it's really solid.
There is Mojeek that is based in UK and have an own search index and web crawler. I wouldn't recommend it. Mojeek.com
Just wait for this https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/
Qwant and Swisscows are in the same basket too.
I think Qwant hasn't been using Bing for awhile now actually
This is missing Spotify and TomTom unless I am missing something
Thanks for the feedback. It is not supposed to be a complete list. It's a start. You can find more alternatives in our database: https://buy-european.net/
One more request then! If appreciate it is your not put text everywhere without additional information. For example the AI filler on the browser page is just noise. Is rather only have the list than contract filters:
""" There are several compelling reasons to opt for European web browsers. These browsers not only prioritize user privacy and data protection but also foster innovation and support local technology ecosystems. """
Thanks for the project by the way!
Organic Maps ftw.
For maps I'd also like to add Organic Maps, OsmAnd and Magic Earth.
Where's Signal (or molly if you need foss)? Signal is an non-profit organisation, so I'd say it can hardly be branded 'from' anywhere unless you're talking about servers location but then...
Signal is still an american non-profit. The HQ is in US and everybody in the board if directors is american.
Signal is centralised, and as such the location of the service operator matters a lot.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Calling Peertube a Youtube alternative is just wrong. It is an alternative in theory but it probably doesn't even have a milionth of the content that Youtube has.
That's the problem with "the winner takes it all" on the Internet. Which European alternative would you suggest instead?
Dailymotion.com is French ...I'd suggest more than recommend but it's still better than all these peer tube type sites.
There is no real YouTube alternative, unfortunately. The content makes a video platform great. No alternative video platform is anywhere close to YouTube in content diversity.
It's unfortunately a very different situation to most other things. For example you can "simply" convince your circle of friends to use Threema. Try convincing your favorite Youtubers to post on any alternative platform and see how far you get.
Isn't mapy.cz just an OSM wrapper, but proprietary?
Missing out the big one here - Spotify is also European fyi.
Spotify was a massive donor to the Trump campaign and pays artists one of the lowest rates per song.
Why don't we include nestle then?
Just because it is European, doesn't mean the company is worth a shit dripping down a wall.
Spotify is a shit company. Pays artists by far the lowest in the industry (especially if you take into account their scummy minimums, catches, and terms for smaller musicians), injects shitty AI songs into Spotify-made playlists so they won't have to pay the artists the little they do, gives "donations" to fascists, and heavily invests in fucking war companies including partnering one who is essentially trying to make "the dark night" tracking machine to pair with AI assassination drones.
(Also side note, have you noticed all of these scummy surveillance companies making their names into very well-known references to pop culture so that all news stories on them are essentially lost to the pop culture void when searching for them? Palantir, helsing, etc...)
Yes, multiple people have pointed this out already and I’ve agreed with them. However I work in the music industry and Spotify is definitely not paying by far the lowest. By sheer volume they’re paying most of the share a song is earning nowadays and even on a per play basis they are fairly similar to their competitors, maybe slightly lower.
We can make the argument that revenue on a per stream basis is much too low in general and I would agree, but then we also have to rethink the entire pricing model.
I told OP this in previous post; Spotify gave money to Trumps' inauguration. That's why it was removed.
Shameless plug for Navidrome
Want your music, always available. No ads, no enshitification. Maximum quality, always reliable?
There is only one clear winner for me.
That’s a fair point.
but also platforms right wingers that had an impact on influencing our election. i get i shouldn't be the one guiding boycotts of my own nation's products, i'm just saying spotify has been antihelpful when it comes to the creation of this situation
Yeah I can totally understand that especially in relation to Rogan etc.
Unfortunately, the PeerTube community is inactive and small. There are basically no interesting videos at all.
[email protected] is quite active and tries to highlight interesting content.
Sorry but 2 posts in the last week can hardly be considered quite active.
Thanks, I will try it out.
SepiaSeach will search a large number of instances for content. Not a bad start for peertube. But I do agree that it's hard to find good content there.
That’s not true. Check out the pinned post at [email protected] for a list of content creators. Also check out the home page of PeerTube.wtf that also has a list of content creators.
Yep, as it doesn't have a monetization incentive it will be never that appealing. There should be a way for authors to earn money.
It’s not about monetisation. It’s about audience. Who is going to bother to host an instance and post to a platform where the most popular videos only get 100 views?
As a musician, I don't like SoundCloud. The free upload limit is way too small, their compression is not great and every time you do anything they try to sell you one of their subscriptions, which also cost way too much imo.
If other musicians didn't use it as much I would have already thrown it out long ago.
Is there a European Android-Alternative?
I've given up on an android alternative, or Google free android due to not wanting to lose banking apps
Android is open source. Most companies make their own versions of android that include google services and their own apps, theming
You can get a version of android without google services or emulated google services. This will make a lot of apps on the google play store not work, but its better for privacy. These are phone-specific so you may not find a version available/supported for the phone you are using. Examples are graphene os(exclusive to pixel phones), lineageos and /e/os
You can also install linux on your phone, but i dont know much about this
SailfishOS
/e/os
How would I utilise these OS on an android phone please?
Here Wego is the worst maps service I've ever had the displeasure of using. Amazon used to use it for deliveries (maybe they still do), and it took almost a year to get it to recognise that my house was not 8 miles away on a completely different road. It messed up the Amazon routes as the route it picked was all in that same area, except my house, that was 8 miles away.
Google moves my address too. And it's not even a new address, just a "new" building. Apple thinks it's a building site (it was built in 2020!). The only map that recognises the address properly is Here Wego.
The whole seznam ecosystem is an alternative to Google, unfortunately it's Czech only
Protonmail is missing.
Any alternative to Trello one of you can recommend?
Canada wants to know: why not zoidberg?
I'm using Obsidian. That's Canadian. Very good editor/PKM in my humble opinion.
Im European and the EU can go fuck themselves.
Plenty others to choose from.Examples?
I'd suggest adding waze on there to be replaced with tomtom amigo as an alternative Also infomaniak as an email alternative You're missing Google Drive -> Filen or Infomaniak
Edit: To clarify, I'm talking about REPLACING waze WITH Tomtom Amigo because waze is google. Seems like that wasn't clear in the original message.
Thanks for the feedback! Definitely something for the next iteration of the infographic but I will make sure to add it to the database asap.
Aren't almost all of these quite terrible?
DeepL is better than Google Translate for the languages it supports. I find that it captures the context better when words have multiple meanings. Some features are paid, for example, translating a text to an informal context (Sie vs du in German).
It does not support as many languages as Google, though. Most European languages are supported.
Between DeepL and Wiktionary, I find I don't even need Google Translate anymore.
Aren't many of the mainstream offers terrible as well, in their own special way?
DeepL is a good translator, though it has a more limited set of supported languages
I wonder why you think so. Some like Peertube & Threema are definitely poor alternatives but I wouldn't say it's "almost all" either.
- Deezer vs Apple Music/Tidal: Deezer has a great selection of music and recommendation algorithm. I've never used Tidal but Deezer is definitely better than Apple Music IMO.
- Tuta/Mailbox.org/Posteo vs Gmail: Well, they all let you send and receive emails. Unless you're an enterprise user, I don't see what advantage Gmail would have over the others.
- HERE WeGo vs Google Maps: Very recently installed HERE and didn't have any issues so far. This can be a bit location-dependent though.
- Ecosia vs Google: Ecosia uses Bing/Google1 as its search index anyway, so the results are almost exactly the same for me.
- DeepL Translate vs Google Translate: DeepL has a more limited selection of languages but for the languages it supports, it's the undisputed king.
- Bolt vs Uber: I only used Bolt a few times while I was in Portugal and it seemed fine. Maybe this is also location-dependent.
1I think it's Bing by default but you can configure it to use Google in the settings.