Why I Built Auto Care Kit, and Why I Reimagined It as Auto Care Plus
I built Auto Care Kit because I couldn’t answer a simple question: when did I last change the oil?
The receipt was somewhere. The date was approximate. The mileage was a guess. I had a folder full of paper and a notes app full of half-finished entries, and I was paying for services I’d probably already had done. So I built the app I wanted to use: a clean place to log every service, set reminders, and stop guessing. Auto Care Kit shipped on iOS and Android, backed by a cloud sync that worked, and for years it did the job.
But the world around it changed. iPhones got better. iCloud got better. Privacy expectations got sharper, and so did mine. The old architecture, built for cross-platform sync through a third-party backend, started to feel like the wrong shape for what people actually wanted: a fast, native app that respected their data and their device.
So I rebuilt it from scratch as Auto Care Plus.
Auto Care Plus is iPhone and iPad only, and that’s the point. It uses iCloud through CloudKit, so your data lives in your own Apple account and nowhere else. I don’t see it, I don’t store it, and I don’t link it to you. Sync is automatic across your devices because Apple handles it natively, not because a server in the middle is shuttling your records around.
The reimagining went further than the backend. I added real collaboration, so you can share a vehicle with a spouse, a parent, or a child and both edit the same service history. I added NHTSA recall lookups, so you can check open safety recalls without leaving the app. Reminders sync to your Apple Calendar. VINs decode automatically. The whole thing feels like an iOS app should feel: quick, quiet, and out of your way.
Auto Care Kit answered the question I had a decade ago. Auto Care Plus is the version I’d build today, for the phone in your pocket right now. It’s on the App Store, and I’d love for you to try it.
