Fishbrain around the Baltic: seven countries, one market question

Part of the «Waze для рыбалки» wiki · Competitive analysis, 2026-07-05 · Status: complete (v1.1 — adversarially verified)
Related: Fishbrain geography · Fishbrain in the Nordics · Competitors · Secret spots · Paid ponds

Why this matters

The global analysis established that Fishbrain is a US bass-belt app with a thin tail. This page closes the ring around the Baltic: the four Nordic natural experiments (folded in from the Nordics page, with the adversarial sweep's corrections applied) plus the three markets that sit between them and Latvia — same date, same method, same depth, so the comparison is finally fair. Each country isolates one variable:

• Sweden — the home-market test: own brand, own language, own city. If liquidity is absent here, nothing but local density matters anywhere.
• Norway — the rich-market test: Europe's highest incomes, near-universal English. Does money buy Fishbrain anything?
• Finland — the participation test: 29% of the population fishes; huge ice culture.
• Denmark — the digitized-small-market test: national online license in a flat 6M-person market; the closest Nordic analog to Latvia.
• Lithuania — the local-champion test: Deeper's home turf — does a world-class local fishing-tech company automatically own the social layer?
• Estonia — the perfect-e-state test: what is left for a private app when the state rail is centralized and liked?
• Poland — the scale test: 38M people and Europe's most iFiske-shaped permit fragmentation — is small-market size the excuse?

All seven verdicts: present-but-dead. And the second finding is bigger than the first: nobody else won the social layer in any of the seven either. The one market question the region answers — what do anglers actually adopt? — has one answer: the must-do transaction, and almost nothing else.

The scoreboard (App Store, 2026-07-05)

Sweden — home market: culture is exonerated

Swedish is in the UI, the brand is Swedish, Stockholm is HQ — and the feed is empty anyway. Swedish reviewers say it plainly (App Store review: "very inactive in countries like Sweden"; forum thread titled "Fishbrain = Dyrt!?"); Swedish press covers Fishbrain as a finance story — a 2022–23 crisis peaking in near-bankruptcy around mid-2023, a $6M rescue at a slashed valuation, an SEK 11.9M insider top-up Sep 2024; FY2023 revenue SEK 162.7M (+27%), loss SEK 55.3M — not a fishing story. The dated "abandoned early" claim verified against the April-2013 app launch: by Nov 2014 Attby was "dominating the US"; by Jan 2015, on Europe: "Not any direct initiatives." One v1.0 claim softened by the sweep: Sweden did get minor content/sponsor deals (FishEco 2022, Swedish Pike League) — but never a license-rail partnership, which is the layer that decides. Eleven years on, the bet that US success "translates into Europe" measurably failed.

Who won instead: iFiske, riding Sweden's structural quirk — fishing rights are private and fragmented across ~2,000 fiskevårdsområden, each needing a per-water fiskekort. iFiske owns that recurring must-do transaction (4.2M permits, 672,500 catch reports as a by-product), out-rating Fishbrain 8.9:1 at home. Meanwhile the state gives regulations away free (svenskafiskeregler.se), so the Fish Rules moat can't be rebuilt, and handheld fishing is free on the whole coast + 5 big lakes, so the mass segment has no purchase moment at all. ~1.2M Swedes fished in 2024 (SCB/HaV; the 2025 update says ~1.1M — gently declining). Blocker ranking for Sweden: captured permit rail → free-fishing structure → empty feed → free state rules data. Culture and language don't make the list — the strongest possible confirmation that local liquidity, not localization, is the game.

Sweden-only lesson: being local is necessary but not sufficient. Fishbrain had every home-field asset and lost to a feed-less utility. Don't build the social layer first — find the fragmented must-do transaction. Latvia's shape: the state card is centralized, but licencētā makšķerēšana permits are sold per-water by municipalities and clubs — that fragmentation is Latvia's iFiske-shaped wedge.

Norway — rich market: money and English bought nothing

Highest incomes in Europe (Pro pricing trivially affordable), near-universal English — and 125 ratings. On Fiskersiden.no's "which apps do you use" thread, Fishbrain is not mentioned once. A Norwegian clone — Fishbuddy by Fiskher (2020, fronted by celebrity angler Asgeir Alvestad, ~1M downloads self-reported, NO→DK/SE→DE) — proved demand for exactly Fishbrain's product exists and took it 12:1.

But the real structure sits above the consumer slot: in the salmon rivers — Norway's highest-value fishery — catch reporting is a legal obligation, zero catches included. The sweep corrected two v1.0 props here: the sanctions are river-level practice, not one national rule — some rivers charge 300 NOK at the next license, others simply refuse a new card until you report — and 2024 ended as the lowest salmon river catch ever recorded (45,200 fish / 147 t, −36% YoY), not "second-lowest"; 33 rivers (Gaula, Orkla, Namsen) were closed mid-season in June 2024, 16 later reopened. The reporting rail is owned by local B2B platforms: Elveguiden (~100 watercourses, ~400 zones; claims ~half of all national salmon catches flow through it — the company's own projection, not independently measured; its consumer App Store count is a meaningless 71), Inatur, Scanatura — won via river-management tenders. The state itself occupies the "regulations app" slot (Fritidsfiskeappen, 772 ratings). Sea fishing is a free allemannsrett — again no purchase moment. Blockers: mandatory-reporting rail captured → local clone owns the consumer slot → no sea purchase moment → culture last.

Norway-only lesson (no other country teaches this): where reporting is compulsory, sell the compliance rail to rights-holders (B2B2C), not a feed to anglers — users show up because they must, and liquidity is a by-product. Latvia's licensed waters with mandatory e-reporting are the same shape. Bonus: the public laksebørs catch boards — river-level totals, never exact spots — are institutional-scale validation of our verify-exact-publish-coarse rule.

Finland — high participation: the category failed, not the competitor

1.6M anglers (29% of the population — 41% of men), 19.1M fishing days, perch/pike/zander at 8.0 / 6.3 / 4.3M kg of the landed ~25M kg, ice fishing practiced by ~10% of the whole population. And Fishbrain has 94 lifetime ratings — statistical zero — with an English-only iOS listing whose SEO page lists cod, carp and flounder as Finnish "top species" (Baltic recreational cod fishing has been closed for years; a template tell that no human ever looked). The irony that kills the language excuse: Swedish is an official language of Finland and IS in Fishbrain's UI set — still nothing.

The state pre-built the entire utility layer for free: Eräluvat owns licensing (record 300K+ fees / €10M+ in 2025), Kalastusrajoitus.fi owns rules, and Omakala owns catch logging — a private-by-default statistical diary behind Suomi.fi auth, whose user base doubled to 27K+ only when reporting seven taxa (salmon, landlocked salmon, trout, char, eel, pink salmon, grayling) became legally mandatory from 1.1.2025 — despite being rated 1.4★. Hook-and-line and ice fishing are free everyman's rights, so much of the market never touches any platform. And the community that exists (old forums) enforces the spot-secrecy norm. The sharpest fact: even the official app reaches 1.7% of anglers. Nobody won Finland — Europe's highest participation produced no social fishing network. The category failed. (This section survived the adversarial sweep 8-for-8 — the best-verified block in the file.)

Finland-only lesson: high participation + full digitization ≠ an app market — but a legal mandate is the one force proven to move Nordic anglers onto an app (Omakala ×2 in 12 months on the law alone, with a 1.4-star product). Make a legal obligation painless and the state hands you distribution no marketing budget can buy.

Denmark — digitized small market: no seam to enter

The closest Nordic analog to Latvia's size and flatness. 567,900 anglers (NIRAS 2024), ~2bn DKK/yr spend — but over half fish exclusively in put-and-take lakes (paid stocked ponds), and the wild culture is coastal sea trout (76% of citizen-science-logged trips — a coast-skewed sample, but the only logged one). The state solved everything Fishbrain monetizes in the US: one national fisketegn bought online in minutes — ~186,400 licenses sold in 2024 (196,158 in 2023; totals incl. weekly/daily), just under 28M DKK/yr (corrected from v1.0's "annual-only / ~30M") — and since Jan 2026 recovery-species catch reporting is mandatory via the state's own EU RecFishing app. Note the funnel gap: 568K self-described anglers vs ~186K license buyers — the put-and-take majority is license-exempt and never touches the state rail at all.

Fishbrain: 94 ratings, #65, English iOS listing, SEO pages listing "Bass" among Danish species (there is no bass fishery in Denmark) — yet that still plausibly makes it the most-downloaded fishing app in Denmark, because the locals are even smaller: DTU Aqua's free, official, Danish-language Fangstjournalen converted 1,130 active loggers in 2024 — 0.2% of anglers — in its tenth year.

Denmark-only lesson: where the state fully owns the utility layer, no private app wins — don't build a logbook or license wrapper in Latvia (manacope.lv already owns the card). The unclaimed asset Denmark reveals is the put-and-take majority: paid, geographically fixed, privately owned waters where "what's biting" is a business's inventory, not a rival good — a liquidity wedge that sidesteps spot-secrecy entirely. This plugs straight into our paid ponds thread.

Lithuania — local champion: the tool king only just started building the feed

Deeper's home turf. LT App Store: Fishbrain 19 ratings, #16 Sports — while Vilnius-built Fish Deeper sits at #11 with 372 ratings (4.8★), plus #3 top-free and #1 top-grossing Sports on Google Play — a ~20:1 out-rating of Fishbrain in its own category, localized in Lithuanian, with 2,000+ Lithuanian lake bathymetric maps. The market is real: ~300,000 anglers (cited in the Nov-2023 Seimas permit-price debate; moderate confidence) — 3× Latvia, in a country of 2.9M — buying 385–420K permits/yr (~€1.7M/yr to the fish fund; the annual ticket doubled €14→€30 from 2024). The rail is one centralized state e-system, ALIS (plus SMS), with residual fragmentation only in leased waters — a much smaller pocket than Latvia's per-water patchwork. And the mandates are hard, Nordic-style: kept salmon/sea trout must be reported within 10 minutes, before leaving the water; since 2025-01-01 all Baltic Sea amateur fishing must be logged in the state app eLaimikis (adoption unpublished). Community still lives in forums (zvejams.lt, zvejotribuna.lt) and Facebook — a decade of Deeper hardware in anglers' pockets did not create social liquidity by itself; Deeper's Waterbody Hub (per-lake feeds, public profiles, follows, catch notifications) only just shipped and is unproven.

Verdict: nobody won consumer social; the state won the utility layer — the mandate-driven rail again, exactly the Nordic pattern. Blockers, ranked: (1) the state already owns the must-do transaction — no permit-aggregation wedge; (2) Deeper's 2,000-lake depth-map moat + hardware install base; (3) community locked in forums/FB with LT-language network effects. Enablers: the social layer is genuinely unclaimed; 300K anglers is real liquidity; eLaimikis friction may create demand for a nicer logging UX.

Lithuania-only lesson: a world-class local fishing-tech company with a decade of hardware in anglers' hands still did not automatically get local social liquidity — tools convert to community only when someone deliberately builds the social layer, and Deeper only just started. For Latvia: (a) Deeper, not Fishbrain, is the regional competitor to watch — Waterbody Hub is precisely our concept, funded, localized, 300 km away, with Riga inside its map coverage; (b) the playbook ports only partially — one ALIS ≠ Latvia's fragmented municipal permits, so an LT entry would have to be community-first on top of state rails; (c) the RU/LV bilingual angle doesn't port — Lithuania's RU-speaking minority is ~5–8% vs Latvia's ~25% (demographic inference).

Estonia — perfect e-state: the wedge closes when the rail gets good

The world's most digital state, and structurally the country most like Latvia (ET/RU bilingual, ice-fishing mass culture, Peipsi/Pärnu Bay). Fishbrain: 13 ratings, #30 Sports — it effectively never entered; the country page is a confirmed SEO ghost. Participation is big: ~160,000 anglers/yr (Kantar Emor 2022; beats Latvia per-capita), ~€52M/yr spend; top recreational catches perch 738 t, pike 714 t, bream 578 t. The rail is three tiers on kalaluba.ee: free simple handline (everyman's right); a fee tier (€2/24h … €27/365d) with no reporting duty; and kalastuskaart quota cards (salmon/trout rivers, nets, protected areas) with mandatory reporting — zero/no-trip reports included, and no new card until you file. A correction to our own earlier premise: reporting applies only to kalastuskaart fishing — the mass market reports nothing, so most Estonian catch data is captured nowhere. There is no per-water fragmentation at all: the state centralized everything into one portal with national pricing (~€750K/yr total transaction layer vs iFiske's 4.2M cumulative permits). The kicker: the UX is good — 67% praised the portal's interface, 75% would recommend it. The Omakala seam does not exist here. What remains private is aging: forums (kalale.ee, kalafoorum.ee; kalaportaal.ee read-only since 2022) drifting to Facebook, and one embryonic app (Kalaradar, 2026 — a vocational student's thesis project, ET/EN/RU, no visible user base).

Verdict: nobody won Estonia — and unlike Finland/Denmark, the state won competently. Blockers, ranked: (1) a centralized, liked, cheap rail — no wrap-the-bad-UX wedge, nothing to aggregate; (2) free/low-fee tiers kill funnel urgency (€27/yr max); (3) community habit sits in legacy forums + Facebook. Enablers: 160K anglers with zero incumbent app; mass-market catch data uncaptured by the state; dying forums = homeless community; a culture nearly identical to Latvia's.

Estonia-only lesson: the compliance wedge is a window, not a moat — it exists only while the state rail is bad. Estonia is the end-state of Mana Cope's trajectory: a competent, centralized, liked state portal leaves no utility seam, and the surviving private space is exactly community + mass-market liquidity — the layers the state never wants. Build the catch/community layer rail-independent now, and treat any future Mana Cope UX overhaul as the wedge's expiry date. Estonia is also proof that Latvia's per-water fragmentation is not guaranteed to persist.

Poland — scale: fragmentation alone doesn't make an aggregator

The big-neighbor test: 38M people, ~1.5–2M anglers (no unified registry; low confidence), a ~1.5B PLN market plus ~800M PLN/yr fishing tourism. Fishbrain: 24 lifetime ratings, #87 Sports — statistical zero in the region's biggest market; the last visible Polish review dates to 2019. The rail is the most iFiske-shaped in Europe: lifetime karta wędkarska (exam) + water-specific permits; PZW national dues + per-okręg water fees + a patchwork of inter-okręg supplements (40–230 zł). Yet no iFiske-of-Poland exists — and the window has closed, because the fragments self-digitized: Gdańsk, Szczecin, Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań and others each run their own e-permit storefront, ZG's central platform covers only a handful of okręgi, and Wody Polskie's WIR began selling permits for state waters online in Dec 2025 — electronic-only from Jan 2026. The state mandated its own digital rail, Nordic-style. PZW itself is shrinking: 625,376 members (2022) → 544,114 (Sept 2024), −13% in two years; ~500K projected for end-2025 (extrapolation — ZG stopped publishing figures, itself telling). Apps have no liquidity anywhere: the largest is Czech Fishsurfing — Poland is its biggest national community at ~18K registered (~1% penetration), partner of the Polish Carp Federation; Polish Fiske took 5 years to reach ~20K; the rest (Zimorodek, Ryboszukacz, Na Ryby…) are hobby-scale. Community lives on wedkuje.pl, classic forums and Facebook. Meanwhile the culturally central paid layer — commercial łowiska (carp/method-feeder put-and-take) — still books by phone and Messenger; znajdzlowisko.pl is a directory, not a booking platform.

Verdict: nobody won Poland. Blockers, ranked: (1) incumbents own the digitizing rail (okręg storefronts + WIR e-only mandate); (2) PZW's political weight and per-okręg balkanization — ~45 separate deals to aggregate; (3) community loyalty to portals/forums/Facebook. Enablers: the PZW exodus is pushing anglers toward commercial waters; łowiska booking is un-digitized; the paid put-and-take culture is strong. Threat scan: no Polish app is positioned to expand north; the one regional expander, Fishsurfing, is a directory/feed with no Baltic transaction hook — threat low.

Poland-only lesson: fragmentation alone doesn't create the aggregator opening — the fragments must be too small to self-digitize. Poland's okręgi (20–30K members each) crossed that threshold and built their own rails; Latvia's licencētā makšķerēšana sellers (municipalities, clubs, single lakes) are far below it, so the gap that closed in Poland is still open at home. But WIR shows the state can pre-empt it — so speed, and a formal partnership with the state rail (be its storefront, not its rival), is the play. Second, validated at 38M scale: paid-water booking is un-digitized even in Poland — the one genuinely unoccupied transaction in the region, and it's secrecy-proof.

Cross-country synthesis — one thesis, seven confirmations

1. The transaction-rail thesis now stands 7-for-7. Who owns the must-do transaction: SE — iFiske (private permits); NO — Elveguiden/Inatur/Scanatura (compulsory salmon reporting); FI — the state (Eräluvat + Omakala); DK — the state (fisketegn + RecFishing); LT — the state (ALIS + eLaimikis + the 10-minute salmon rule); EE — the state (kalaluba.ee); PL — the incumbents themselves (okręg storefronts + the state's WIR). In every country the social feed lost to whoever owned that transaction — and note that in the only two countries where the rail is private (SE, NO), the rail-owner is also the only private winner anywhere in the seven.
2. Legal mandates are still the only proven adoption engine — now with five instances. Omakala ×2 in a year at 1.4★ (FI); Elveguiden's tender-won compulsory reporting (NO); state-installed RecFishing (DK); eLaimikis + report-within-10-minutes (LT); kalastuskaart reporting wired to card renewal (EE). No marketing budget in the region has ever moved anglers like a law.
3. Nobody won the social layer in any of the seven. Not Fishbrain, and not the locals either: iFiske has no feed by design; Fishbuddy's 12:1 win is 1,500 ratings — a won slot, not won liquidity; Finland and Denmark produced nothing; Fishsurfing's best-in-region ~18K Poles is ~1% penetration; Deeper's Waterbody Hub is brand-new scaffolding. Feed-first has now failed in seven consecutive markets at every scale from 1.3M people (EE) to 38M (PL). Free-fishing structures are half the reason: free coast + big lakes (SE), free sea (NO), free everyman hook/ice (FI, EE) gut the funnel — huge angler populations with no purchase moment. Latvia's near-universal cheap state card is the same shape.
4. The Deeper threat is real but structurally muzzled. The deep-dive: Deeper UAB is PE-owned (Resource Partners, 2021), ~€13.8M revenue 2024, returning to profit after three loss-making years, headcount past its trough; Fish Deeper has ~1.2M cumulative Play downloads, 50,000+ crowdsourced bathymetric maps, and Baltic per-capita density roughly two orders of magnitude above its US level (LT 372 iOS ratings vs US 653). It owns "know the water" — but not liquidity: its new social layer deliberately hides exact spots, because open spot-sharing would cannibalize the Premium map subscription and devalue the sonar. A pivot to real-time spot liquidity means breaking its own privacy-default design and hardware funnel under PE margin discipline — unlikely. Don't fight it on depth maps; collide where it can't follow: real-time "bite now" liquidity, verify-exact-publish-coarse spot governance, Latvian license integration, and hardware-agnostic identity for the 95% of anglers who will never buy a €160–320 sonar.
5. The compliance wedge is a window, not a moat (Estonia's contribution). The wedge exists where the mandate is real and the state rail is bad (FI's 1.4★ Omakala, LT's friction-heavy eLaimikis). Where the rail is good (EE: 67% approval), the wedge is foreclosed. Latvia's wedge is open today because Mana Cope is bad, not because the mandate guarantees anything — and the expiry date is not ours to set.
6. Two layers remain un-digitized across the whole region: (a) paid-water booking — Denmark's put-and-take majority, Poland's phone-and-Messenger łowiska at 38M scale, Latvia's платники: a business's inventory, not a rival good, hence secrecy-proof; (b) community liquidity itself — homeless everywhere as the forum generation (zvejams.lt, kalale.ee, wedkuje.pl, Kalassa.net…) ages into Facebook groups. Transparency and secrecy still coexist by design at institutional scale (laksebørs: public river totals, never spots) — external validation of verify-exact-publish-coarse.

Playbook for the Latvia challenger

Merges and supersedes the Nordics list, which extended the global 8-point list:

• Wedge = the fragmented/compulsory transaction, not the feed — now with Poland's boundary condition: the fragments must be too small to self-digitize. Latvia's per-water municipal/club permit sellers are; PZW's 20–30K-member okręgi weren't.
• Don't rebuild what the state owns — integrate, and be fast. Confirmed in all seven. Estonia sets the expiry logic (the rail gets good), Poland shows active pre-emption (WIR e-only). Be the state rail's storefront before Latvia builds a competent one.
• Make the legal obligation painless. The bar is on the floor (Omakala 1.4★, eLaimikis resented) and mandates are the region's only proven distribution engine.
• Build community/liquidity rail-independent — the one layer the state never wants (EE proof) and nobody has won (7/7 proof). It must survive the compliance window closing.
• Paid/private waters are the secrecy-proof liquidity pool — now validated at 38M scale: put-and-take/łowiska booking is un-digitized everywhere in the region. Pond owners = B2B distribution → paid ponds.
• The consumer slot is winnable as a second act (Fishbuddy took Norway 12:1 with a local celebrity-angler launch) — after the transaction rail seeds liquidity.
• Don't fight Deeper on depth maps. Its crowdsourced bathymetry beats anything a new app can offer; compete only on the axes its business model forbids (open-but-governed spots, real-time liquidity, license rails, no-hardware identity).

Expansion portability, ranked: ① Estonia — the best second market for the community/liquidity product (near-identical ET/RU bilingual ice culture, zero incumbent, mass-market catch data uncaptured) but a dead market for any license/reporting product; ② Lithuania — community-first only, on top of state rails, in Deeper's back yard, LT-monolingual (the RU/LV bilingual angle doesn't port); ③ Poland — rails captured, but the łowiska-booking layer is huge and open: enter through paid waters or not at all; ④ the Nordics — reference markets, not expansion markets (everything monetizable is captured or state-owned).

Threat board: Deeper — highest and closest, but structurally constrained (synthesis #4); Fishbuddy/Fiskher — the realistic "someone fights back" scenario: ~1M self-reported downloads and a proven adjacent-small-market playbook (NO→DK/SE→DE), never war-gamed — flagged by the completeness critic; Fishsurfing — low (directory/feed, no Baltic transaction hook); Fishbrain — will not contest Latvia as a priority, but its zero-marginal-cost ambient presence (global app + SEO ghost pages) quietly takes English-comfortable early adopters.

Verification — the adversarial sweep (v1.1)

An 11-agent sweep ran against v1.0: 8 theme-skeptics (traffic/financials, US core, natural experiments, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, strategy analogies) re-verified 62 load-bearing claims against primary sources, plus a 13-storefront store-rank re-measurement (6 apps, iOS + Play), a Deeper/Fish Deeper competitor audit, and a completeness critic. Verdicts: 44 CONFIRMED · 16 CORRECTED · 2 UNVERIFIABLE. Finland survived 8-for-8; the weakest block was the strategy analogies (5 of 8 corrected).

Key corrections applied to this page:

• Norway: Elveguiden's "~half of all salmon catches" is the company's own 2022 projection, not a measured share; the 300 NOK non-reporting fee is per-river practice, not a national rule (many rivers instead refuse the next card); 2024 was the lowest salmon catch ever recorded (45,200 fish / 147 t), not second-lowest.
• Denmark: the 186,406 (2024) / 196,158 (2023) licenses are totals incl. weekly/daily, not annual-only; revenue just under 28M DKK/yr, not ~30M; the unverifiable "COVID peak ~170K+" was dropped; DSF is now 18,800 members / 116 clubs.
• Sweden: "no Swedish partnerships" was too strong — minor content/sponsor deals existed (FishEco 2022, Swedish Pike League), though never a license-rail one; the "very inactive in Sweden" quote is an App Store review, not fiskesajten.se (citation fixed); 2025 participation ~1.1M.
• Company history: near-bankruptcy peaked ~mid-2023 (not 2022); "abandoned by year 2" holds against the April-2013 app launch, not the 2010 founding; Pro is $74.99/yr ($9.99/mo); Fish Rules is North-America-only (30+ US states + Bahamas); current US angler spend is ~$99B/yr (ASA, 2022 data) — the $48B figure was a decade stale.
• Analogies reframed: Bolt/Baltics, ANGLERS/Japan and ss.lv are "the global player never seriously showed up" cases, not local-beats-global-in-open-combat; Strava's real edge is single-player utility, which a fishing-liquidity app lacks — so the cold-start problem is harder than the old framing implied. The operative conclusion survives and sharpens: Fishbrain won't contest Latvia; the real competition is local.

Still unverifiable: Fishbrain's current MAU (last hard figure: 800K+, May 2022; "~1.1–1.5M today" stays labeled as inference); per-country Google Play counts (public data is global-only); Elveguiden's true national catch share; eLaimikis adoption (unpublished); LT's 300K and PL's 1.5–2M angler counts (no registries).

Completeness critic — top remaining gaps (its items "measure the Baltics directly" and "audit Deeper" were closed by this page's LT/EE/PL research and the Deeper deep-dive; "category existence at scale" is half-closed by Poland):

1. Latvia's own wedge is still an assumption — nobody has counted licencētā makšķerēšana waters, permit sellers, or the exact scope of mandatory reporting. The single highest-priority follow-up: if manacope.lv already covers it, the wedge doesn't exist.
2. EU regulatory trajectory — if Denmark's RecFishing mandate is an EU-wide framework headed for Latvia with a state app attached, the compliance wedge dies exactly as in DK/FI — potentially before a line of code.
3. Category existence proof in the rest of coarse/secretive Europe (DE/CZ/RU-speaking apps) — if the social layer is unbuildable everywhere, the go/no-go flips to utility/B2B-or-nothing.
4. Retention/engagement benchmarks — no numeric definition of "liquidity achieved" exists yet, so go/no-go can't state its own success threshold.
5. Fishbuddy/Fiskher war-game — funding, DE performance, expansion roadmap; is the Baltic next?

Data flags

Store ranks/rating counts are a 2026-07-05 point-in-time scrape (iTunes Lookup API + store pages, 13 storefronts). Google Play review counts are global-only (per-country not published); identical per-country Play averages across small markets are a regional fallback, not real country data; Similarweb Play charts are dated Jul 3 and cut off at ~top 51. Two nuances from the re-measurement: Fishbrain's iOS listings are English-only outside SE/JP, but its Play listings are localized in all 9 probed languages — "English-only" claims are iOS-specific (the UI itself stays 6 languages either way); and Fishbrain charts on Play top-free in the Nordics (FI #14, NO #41, SE #47, DK #50) — its Android presence is a notch stronger than iOS ranks suggest. Chart positions in small countries ride on tiny absolute numbers (Fishbrain "charts" at LT #16 / EE #30 / LV #28 with 19 / 13 / 11 ratings) — rank without volume is noise.

Low-confidence items, by country: SE — pre-2024 participation series; species ranking. NO — Elveguiden's apparent SpeedyBooker/FishPal ownership; participation series ends 2014; Fishbuddy's ~1M downloads self-reported. FI — precision notes only (species figures are of the landed ~25M kg; 1.8M was a recent-series peak). DK — AppsAndroid's "~15,000 Copenhagen-area users" (single uncited blog); NIRAS figures single-source. LT — 300K anglers (a political statement, not registry data); eLaimikis adoption unpublished; FB group sizes login-walled. EE — the ministry's ~50K figure likely counts paid-permit holders only (160K is the survey number); kalale.ee "largest forum" self-sourced; Kalaradar adoption unknown. PL — angler count has no registry; PZW's ~500K for 2025 is extrapolation.

Sources

Sweden: Fishbrain — SE App Store · iFiske — SE App Store · iFiske.se scale counters · Tech.eu Fishbrain profile, Jan 2015 · Attby interview, Nov 2014 · Swedish Tech News — turnaround, Sep 2024 · Breakit — "nära konkurs", Sep 2024 · Svenska fiskeregler — 1.2M anglers 2024 · HaV — fritidsfiske facts (2025 update) · Sportfiskarna record 2025 · fiskesnack: "Fishbrain = Dyrt!?" · FishEco × Fishbrain content deal, Feb 2022 · Swedish Pike League · Länsstyrelsen — free handredskapsfiske, 5 lakes, ~2,000 FVOs · Fiskher SE launch · Voister/CIO Analytics — iFiske +80%
Norway: Fishbrain — NO App Store · Fishbuddy — NO App Store · Fritidsfiskeappen — NO App Store · Elveguiden — NO App Store · Elveguiden — scale claims · Elveguiden — grunneier blog (40K users, 1.5M visits) · Norske Lakseelver — reporting system 2023 · Inatur laksebørs · Scanatura · SNL — fritidsfiske · Miljødirektoratet — fiskeravgift · Miljødirektoratet — laksefisket stanses 23. juni 2024 · SSB — elvefiske 2024 (lowest ever) · Fiskeridirektoratet — sea angling free for all · Fiskher AS — Fishbuddy launch · Fishbuddy — about (1M anglers) · Fiskersiden forum — app thread · Tana — 300 kr tilleggsavgift
Finland: Fishbrain — FI App Store · Fishbrain FI country page · Luke — 2024 participation · Luke — Vapaa-ajankalastus 2024 · Luke — 2022 statistics (1.8M) · MT — Omakala ~30K users · Omakala — FI App Store (1.4★) · Valtioneuvosto — reporting decree 1.1.2025 · Luke — mandatory reporting channels · Kalastajan Kanava — €10M license fees · Eräluvat — fisheries fee · MMM — Kalastusrajoitus.fi · SVK — 2024 statistics · FishSec — Baltic cod ban · Kalamies forum — FishBrain thread
Denmark: Fishbrain — DK App Store · Fishbrain DK country page · AppsAndroid.dk — app roundup · DTU Aqua — Fangstjournalen at 10 · DTU Aqua — 2024 status (1,130 loggers) · Sportsfiskeren — NIRAS 567,900 anglers · Effektivt Landbrug — license totals 2023/24, ~28M DKK · Fisk & Fri — fisketegn 2018–2022 · fisketegn.dk · Sportsfiskeren — RecFishing mandate, Jan 2026 · DSF — organisation (18,800 members / 116 clubs) · Fishing Zealand · Smaabaadsnyt — Fishing in Denmark launch
Lithuania: Fishbrain — LT App Store · Fishbrain LT country page · Fish Deeper — LT App Store · Deeper support — 2,000+ LT lake maps · AAD — mėgėjų žvejybos leidimai · AAD — lašišos ir šlakiai (10-min rule) · ALIS permit system · AM — ALIS sales stats · ve.lt — permit prices double; ~300K anglers · ZUM — eLaimikis mandatory from 2025 · Infolex — sea-fishing rules amendment · Ūkininko patarėjas — eLaimikis purpose · zvejams.lt · Žvejo Tribūna forum · pasiskaitom.lt — LT channels & forums · TELE2 app listicle
Estonia: Fishbrain — EE App Store · Fishbrain EE country page · kalaluba.ee · Kalastusinfo — püügiaruanne (reporting scope) · Kalastusinfo — kalastuskaart · Kalastaja.ee — kalaluba.ee FAQ (67%/75% UX) · agri.ee — harrastuspüük · agri.ee — fee rates from 1.07.2024 · Kliimaministeerium — Kantar Emor 2022 survey · Kalastaja.ee — Kalaradar app · kalaradar.ee · PTA — PERK e-logbook · PRIA — commercial reporting from 1.07.2024 · Eesti Kalastajate Selts · kalafoorum.ee · kalalefoorum.ee · Keskkonnaamet — kalanduse taotlused
Poland: Fishbrain — PL App Store · Wody Polskie — permits online in WIR · wedkuje.pl — PZW membership counts · wedkuje.pl FB — PZW 2022–2024 data · Radio Gozdawa — PZW to end-2025 · PZW ZG — e-permits on wedkarz.pzw.pl · wedkarz.pzw.pl — active okręgi · PZW Gdańsk e-zezwolenia · PZW Szczecin · PZW Kraków · PZW Kraków — składki 2026 · PZW Kielce — porozumienia 2026 · Fishing-test.pl — Fishsurfing, 18K Poles · PFWK — Fishsurfing partnership · Fiske · Zimorodek — Google Play · Wiadomości Wędkarskie — Zimorodek · Shape.pl — angler count · Głos Wielkopolski — market value · ZnajdźŁowisko.pl · Podbierak — method feeder · wedkuje.pl
Company & verification sweep: Similarweb — fishbrain.com traffic · PRNewswire — Republic raise, Jul 2022 (14M users, 800K+ MAU, 200K+ subs, $10M rev) · KingsCrowd — Fishbrain on Republic · Breakit — Attby leaves, Aug 2023 · Businesswire — Fishbrain × Aspira, Feb 2022 · Sport Fishing Mag — Pro pricing · NMMA/RBFF — record 57.9M US anglers 2024 · ASA — sportfishing economic impact (~$99B) · Fish Rules · Fishbrain — US App Store · Deeper — about (50 countries, 2M+ downloads claim) · tax.lt — Deeper UAB registry financials · 15min — Resource Partners buyout · AppBrain — Fish Deeper (~1.2M Play installs) · Deeper support — Fish Deeper Premium · Forbes — Bolt "beat Uber at its own game" · TechCrunch — Uber's exit economics · BRIDGE — ANGLERS, Dec 2016 · PR Times — ANGLERS scale · Store re-measurement: iTunes Lookup API + apps.apple.com chartPosition + play.google.com JSON-LD + Similarweb Play top charts, 13 storefronts, fetched 2026-07-05.