Where Almada is ahead
One thing here is genuinely unusual: the council publishes, on its transparency page, the number of occurrences reported per month, the number completed per month, and the annual distribution by type.
Publishing the completed ones and not only the received ones is the hard part, because it exposes performance rather than just demand. That is more operational transparency than most authorities offer, and more than CleanSpot currently publishes about any individual council.
The app belongs to Almada council itself, has been running since January 2017, is free, and covers urban cleaning, public space maintenance, animals, street lighting, green spaces, civil protection, playgrounds and traffic.
The form asks for your taxpayer number
To file a report through Almada Mais Perto you must supply name, email, taxpayer number and telephone number, alongside the address or map pin, the photo and the description.
That is a defensible choice for a public authority: it identifies the resident and allows a formal reply to the case. But it is a trade, and it is the trade that decides how many people reach the end of the form. Reporting a dumped bag now requires remembering your tax number while standing on the pavement holding a phone.
On CleanSpot, reporting is a photo, a pin and send. We ask for no taxpayer number and no phone number. You need an account to publish, because reports are attributed and that is what keeps the map credible, but that is once rather than per report.
Official channel is a status, not a capability
Two things worth separating, because they usually arrive together. Routing a report into a council’s workflow is not something CleanSpot cannot do: the CleanSpot municipal dashboard has a triage inbox scoped to the territory, assignment to internal crews or external contractors, tracking through to closure, analytics, and configurable email reports at whatever cadence the council wants.
The difference is not technical, it is adoption. This authority has adopted its own app; where a council subscribes to CleanSpot, reports enter the same kind of workflow.
And adoption cuts both ways. A municipal app exists only where it has been bought and configured. CleanSpot also works in every municipality where nothing has been adopted at all, which is most of them.
The structural difference: one municipality
Almada Mais Perto covers Almada. That is not a criticism, it is the definition of the category: municipal apps, built by one municipality for its own territory.
The practical effect is that the app stops being useful on the other side of the bridge, or in Seixal, or in Barreiro, and that anyone in a council without an app never had a channel. Covering the south bank would take several different apps.
CleanSpot resolves the municipality and the parish automatically from the coordinates of the pin, against real administrative boundaries. The same app works in Almada, in Sintra and in Bragança, and each report is routed to the correct territory with nothing for the user to choose.
Reporting to the council, or recording in public
In a municipal app the report is a case between you and the services. On CleanSpot it is a pin on a public map from the start: neighbours see it, confirm it, add photos and can volunteer to clear it.
That is the difference that matters when nobody turns up. In a municipal channel, the alternative to silence is chasing. In a network, the alternative is somebody acting, alone or at a cleanup arranged with a group.
What CleanSpot adds
- A public map with date, photo and coordinates for everything reported
- Cleanups and group events, with invitations, RSVPs and a shared recap at the end
- Groups, comments and messages between neighbours
- Vision AI that suggests severity and tags from the photo
- Duplicate detection within a few metres, so evidence is not fragmented
- Per-location recurrence history, which is the argument for a new container or a different collection frequency
- Works offline and uploads when there is a connection
- No advertising, data hosted in the EU, exportable and deletable by the user
- 30 languages
Using both is the honest answer
If the problem is the council's responsibility and it is in Almada, the official channel is the shortest route to whoever has to fix it, and the council publicly shows how many occurrences it closes.
CleanSpot covers what falls outside that: litter the community can clear itself, the dated public record that serves as evidence when a site is recurring, and the whole territory that app does not reach.
Sources
Is a taxpayer number really mandatory in Almada Mais Perto?
According to Almada council's own page, the mandatory fields are name, email, taxpayer number and contact telephone number. CleanSpot asks for neither a taxpayer number nor a phone number.
Does Almada Mais Perto work in other municipalities?
No. It is Almada council's app for the Almada municipality. CleanSpot works anywhere and resolves municipality and parish from the coordinates.
Should I stop using Almada Mais Perto?
No. For a problem that belongs to the authority it is the official route, and Almada is one of the few councils that publishes how many occurrences it completes each month. Use both.
Does CleanSpot show how many reports were resolved?
Every report publicly shows its own lifecycle, open, being cleaned, cleaned, with before-and-after photos. We do not currently publish a monthly per-council report the way Almada does; where the authority is a customer, those figures exist in the municipal dashboard.