Desktop + Mobile = Software

Hi people!

We hope you all had a nice summer and that you’re still around exploring new and exciting software on AlternativeTo. It’s time for a short update on what has happened on the site lately.

Thank you

First of all we want to take this chance to thank you all for coming to the site and for telling your friends about AlternativeTo. More and more people find their way here every day and it’s mostly organic traffic which makes us very happy. Also, a big thank you to our friend @ziddax who submitted the site to Reddit last week which resulted in a big traffic spike when people there seemed to like it.

Desktop and Mobile merged

It have come to our attention that many users didn’t know there were mobile applications on the site since the desktop version was selected by default when your browsed to http://alternativeto.net directly. There have always been tabs for desktop and mobile right below the logo but it could had been made more obvious. What we decided to do was to merge the two versions into one since it’s all software anyway. The main menu now contains links to all the popular platforms from both the old desktop and mobile versions. And in case you didn’t know, there are other platforms than those in the menu. If you looking for Blackberry, Java or something else then just search for it and you fill find it.

iPhone and iPad

Apple keeps innovating and changing the world of mobile devices and AlternativeTo recently went from having a platform called iPhone to renaming it iPhone OS when the iPad was released. Now Apple renamed the whole platform into iOS but we have decided to split the platform into iPhone and iPad since the applications developed for the big iPad screen don’t work on an iPhone and iPhone apps are kind of useless on an iPad. We believe that there should be a way to filter on only the type of platform you’re interested in and we hope you agree that this is the right way to go.

Let us know if you have any thoughts on these changes or anything else. A great way to give feedback is to sound off in the Discussions that we introduced with our latest blog post a while back. After a slow start the activity in the different discussion forums have increased a lot and the quality of the feedback is incredible.

Follow AlternativeTo, Markus and Ola on Twitter for more more frequent updates.