iFixit's new app is ready to take the lead on repairs with its FixBot AI assistant

For as satisfying as it can be to repair your own gear, going the DIY route can absolutely be an anxiety-inducing experience. How many times have you wanted to undertake a project but just lacked the confidence to get started, not even knowing where to start? If you’ve come to appreciate the utility of AI systems in helping bootstrap solutions to problems like that, you’re definitely going to want to check out iFixit’s new app, introducing its AI-powered FixBot helper.

Let’s start with the app itself, because even FixBot notwithstanding, there’s still a lot of interesting stuff going on here. This launch represents a return to form for iFixit, which hasn’t had a “regular” Android app in years (instead retiring it to GitHub —although there’s still a dedicated app for the FixHub soldering station). Not only does this Play Store release give you access to the site’s compendium of repair guide materials, but also makes it easy to order the parts and tools you’ll need, as well as learn how to use them.

The app’s also got its eye on your phone’s biggest consumable component, keeping an eye on battery health, and helping you decide when it might finally be time for a battery replacement.

That’s all great, but we had to see just how FixBot might be able to take the experience to the next level, and fired up the iFixit app to see what it had to suggest for a couple repair projects.

If you’re comfortable identifying the hardware you’re working with, FixBot lets you manually specify the device in question. Then you just tell the assistant what you’d like help fixing, and it pulls up the relevant iFixit guide. In our brief tests this worked quite well, quickly surfacing the relevant materials for the job.

If you’re a little less sure what you’re working with, you can always take a picture and leave it to FixBot to make an identification. This also works well, but in our tests we did notice it taking what felt like an extraordinary amount of time — tens of seconds, although that could always get better, and we were looking at an early release, to be fair.

It was even smart enough to recognize that we were interested in repairing a right Joy-Con, rather than bring us to an ambiguous guide addressing both left- and right-side repairs.

That works for products with explicit iFixit guides, but we also tried FixBot for a device without that kind of coverage: the Anova Precision Oven. Here, the experience was much higher-level, offering general tips but lacking specifics — when asked about how to open the appliance to access a thermal fuse, we couldn’t get any real info about where to locate the fuse, or what kind of screwdriver we’d need. That feels pretty par-for-the-course with AI offerings in 2025.

Still, even with some limitations, this is a nice step forward for iFixit. Look for the new app on both the Play Store and Apple’s App Store alike.