CleanSpot vs A Minha Rua (Portugal)

The short version

• A Minha Rua is available only in participating câmaras municipais and juntas de freguesia. Coverage depends on your council.
• CleanSpot works the moment someone installs it, anywhere, routing by administrative polygon down to the parish, with no institutional adoption required.
• A Minha Rua is the official state channel. CleanSpot has no such status, and we say so plainly.
• CleanSpot adds everything after the report: volunteers, crews, events, before-and-after proof, recurrence history, messaging, groups and AI.

Coverage: membership vs geography

This is the structural difference. Per the service page on gov.pt, A Minha Rua is available "only for participating municipalities and parish councils". If your municipality has not joined, the channel does not exist for you. Lisbon, for instance, runs its own Na Minha Rua Lx app.

CleanSpot does not have that problem because it does not depend on anyone joining. It is the same app in Lisbon, in Bragança, in Greece or in Spain, and the report is always attached to the correct territory.

Automatic routing, down to the parish

When you create a report we do not ask which municipality it belongs to, and we do not ask for a postcode. The coordinates are resolved against imported administrative polygons in PostGIS, and the report is automatically tagged with the municipality and the freguesia that contain it.

That is more reliable than the phone alone. Handset geocoders drift near boundaries: ours corrects, for example, the case where the device returns "Lisboa" for a point that is in Loures. A report made 40 metres from a boundary goes to the right council, which is the one that has to deal with it.

For the citizen this means one simple thing: you never have to know whose responsibility it is. Take the photo and the system handles the rest.

The report is the beginning, not the end

A contact channel receives requests and tracks the case. That is what it does, and it does it well.

On CleanSpot the report opens a cycle. Anyone can volunteer to clean that spot. Several people can do it together as a crew, and all of them get credit. The cleanup closes with before-and-after photos. If the site is used for dumping again, reopening it attaches the new evidence to the same point rather than starting a fresh complaint.

It is that series, the same place, dated and photographed over months, that supports a concrete request to the council: a container, a different collection frequency, signage. A sequence of isolated reports does not build it.

And there is the part no official channel does: the bag a neighbour could remove in ten minutes does not have to wait for a municipal vehicle.

A network, not a form

Cleanups get organised between people. CleanSpot ships that layer instead of delegating it to a WhatsApp group.

• Connections and direct messages, with replies, reactions and message requests
• Groups with a feed, posts, announcements and challenges, and a spatial identity that makes nearby groups discoverable
• Cleanup events with RSVPs, invites and private events by join code
• A group chat attached to each event, so the crew coordinates before and during
• Comments with @mentions on reports, events and group content
• EcoPoints, ranks, badges and local leaderboards: what makes people come back rather than report once

AI applied to the actual work

• Photograph it and vision AI suggests title, description, severity and the issue category. You edit what you get, with a persistent undo.
• Translation for the reader: any report can be shown in the reader language, cached server-side. In a tourist area or one with a foreign community, a report written in Portuguese becomes legible to someone who does not speak it, and the reverse.
• Duplicate detection within 15 metres at submission, adding your photo to the existing report rather than fragmenting the evidence.
• The app ships in 30 languages.

For the council

If your municipality subscribes to the dashboard, reports in the territory arrive in a triage inbox, can be assigned to internal teams or external contractors, tracked on a kanban board and a map, and closed with the outcome visible to whoever reported it.

There are also configurable email reports: recipients, content types, severity floor, parish and cadence, from five-minute alerts to monthly summaries, and analytics computed in the municipality own timezone.

The difference from deploying a new channel: because the app is already used by citizens regardless of whether the council has joined, there are likely reports in your territory today. There is no adoption campaign to fund before the data starts.

Official status, and what it does and does not mean

Official status. A Minha Rua is the state service, run by the state technology agency, and a report through it is a formal submission to the competent authority. A CleanSpot report is not.

So the honest answer, for anything requiring a formal record, is to use both: the official channel so it is formally logged, and CleanSpot so the problem stays visible, tracked and, where it can be, resolved by the people who walk past it daily.

Sources

• gov.pt — Comunicar ocorrências no espaço público (A Minha Rua) (2026-08-28)
• Câmara Municipal de Lisboa — Na Minha Rua Lx (2026-08-28)
• Na Minha Rua Lx — Google Play (2026-08-28)