A new app with a straightforward name wants to make it easier for people to fix their stuff by helping them find trustworthy repair services near them.
The Repair App launched today, on a day that’s being celebrated as International Repair Day. The app is currently available in beta form in the US and France, because that’s where cofounders Robert Lise and Caleb Faruki reside, respectively. If the app does well, more countries should be added soon.
The app arrives during a time of renewed interest in the right to repair movement. Through lobbying efforts and consumer advocacy campaigns, right to repair folks argue that when somebody buys a piece of technology, they should have the legal right to fix it, replace broken parts, or upgrade it using services, tools, and replacement parts accessed on the open market.
“You don’t actually own something if you don’t have the ability to repair it,” says Lise, the app’s cofounder.
It sounds like a position that doesn’t need much advocacy, but large companies like Apple, Samsung, and John Deere, have been resistant to allow their customers to tinker with their products.
Lise says the goal of The Repair App is to platform businesses and service providers who cover just about anything that can be repaired, from devices like phones and computers to bicycles, clothes, and maybe eventually vehicles. To start, they have reached out to verified repair businesses that they can vet for inclusion in the app.
Matt Zieminski, vice president of Repair.org and VP of partnerships at the repair marketplace iFixit, has worked with Lise and the others on the Repair App and says he supports the project. He says that if the app is utilized by enough people, it could make finding options for fixing your stuff easier than it is now.
For example, if you’re searching for repair options on Google, Zieminski says, your local community repair shops might not necessarily come up as one of the top results. Instead, you’re presented with big repair franchises or generic service providers.
The Repair App will instead show you the shops closest to you that have been vetted by the tech repair experts behind the app.
“I think this is really cool,” Zieminski says. ”It is going to level that playing field and allow everybody to find the services they need and then to offer the services to people that may not even know those services exist.”
Linking customers to businesses is certainly not a new service. (Remember phonebooks?) Sites like Thumbtack or Angi (formerly Angie’s List) have long acted as repositories for finding handypeople to hire for a variety of tasks. Places like Upwork and Fiverr put a gig economy spin on the same format. And there are more specific service finder sites like RepairPal, a resource for car repair shops. (RepairPal was bought by Yelp last year.)
