Frequently Asked Questions

It keeps a record of the vehicles you own, and tells you what it works out from that record. In particular it:

• Scores the vehicle's condition out of 100, and shows you which figures moved the score.
• Keeps a maintenance schedule and projects when each job falls due, from your mileage and the dates you log.
• Reminds you before something is due.
• Keeps your service history on your account rather than in a folder in the glovebox.
• Looks up published safety recalls for your make, model and year.
• Works out what the car costs you to run, from the fill-ups you log.
• Answers questions about that specific car through an assistant.
• Finds garages, fuel and parts shops near you.

On the paid tier it also estimates a value range, checks a repair quote against your own record, guides you through a walkaround of a car you are thinking of buying, and reads your car's own diagnostics through an adapter.

No. That is most of the point of it.

Adding a vehicle is make, model, year and the number on the odometer. After that the app tells you what is due rather than waiting for you to ask. Logging a service is a date, a mileage and what was done, and you can write it in your own words.

iPhone and Android, from one app. Both get the same features, with one difference worth knowing about: reading your car's diagnostics needs a Bluetooth LE adapter on either phone, and the reason for that is an iPhone limitation rather than ours. See OBD-II and the adapter.

Mostly. Your garage, your service history, your schedule and your score are held on the phone as well as on your account, so they open and read with no connection at all, and anything you add or log while offline syncs by itself when the signal comes back.

What needs a connection is anything that asks somebody else a question: the assistant, the recall lookup, Nearby and Part Finder.

No. The first run asks your name, takes one vehicle, and shows you its health score before it asks you to sign up for anything. If the number is not worth an account to you, you have lost a minute.

Signing in is what makes the garage yours rather than that phone's: your history then survives a lost phone, a new phone, and a reinstall.

One on the free tier, five on Pro. See Free, Pro and paying.

Five things feed it and nothing else does:

• Service upkeep, worth 50. What you have logged, what the schedule says is due, and what is overdue.
• Mileage against the vehicle's age, worth 20. Whether it has done more or less than is normal for a car of that age.
• The age itself, worth 12.
• The make's reliability record, worth 10.
• The powertrain, worth 8.

It is arithmetic, done on your phone, and the app breaks it down so you can see which of the five moved it and by how much. You can work the whole thing yourself on the calculator on the home page, which runs the same sums.

Because it is the only one of the five you can do anything about. Age, make and powertrain are fixed the day you buy the car, and mileage only goes one way.

A score built mostly from those would be a number about your purchase rather than about your ownership, and it would fall every month whatever you did. Weighting upkeep at half means the score answers a question you can act on: am I keeping on top of this car?

No. More records can only ever help.

This is worth stating plainly because an earlier version of the scoring got it backwards. A service record carries an odometer reading, the mileage factor fell as that reading rose, and there was no upkeep factor to offset it, so doing the maintenance and writing it down made the number go down. Upkeep and the mileage deficit are now spent from one shared budget, which is what guarantees the arrow points the right way.

Only a nearly new car with a full history can approach it, because age and mileage are worth 32 points between them and neither can be earned back.

The number to watch is not the total but the direction. A ten-year-old car with everything logged and nothing overdue is doing as well as a ten-year-old car can do, and the upkeep factor is where you will see that.

Neither. Both are held for other purposes and are deliberately kept out of the scoring: the VIN unlocks the recall lookup, and the purchase price gives the Trade-In Oracle somewhere to start from. The score judges the machine, not the deal you got.

Nobody. It is not shared, not sold, not shown to a garage or an insurer, and no decision about you is made from it anywhere. It also is not evidence of anything: a score of 100 means nothing to an inspector, an insurer or a court.

They are conventional intervals for the type of vehicle, not your manufacturer's schedule for your exact model, trim and market. There is no database of every manufacturer's servicing plan in this app, and any app claiming otherwise is worth a second look.

Your handbook is right and we are not. It was written for your car by the people who built it. Where the two disagree, follow the handbook, and treat what the app says as a prompt to go and check.

Because nothing else can move that number. It is captured when you add the vehicle, and after that only logging a service advances it, which most owners do a few times a year.

Meanwhile everything worked out from it goes stale: when the next service falls due, what the car is costing you, and the mileage factor worth 20 points of the score. A car that has done 8,000 km since March is otherwise scored and scheduled as though it had not moved.

So the app asks once a week, on a Sunday morning, in a single notification however many cars you keep. Turn it off in Settings if you would rather it did not.

Your phone schedules them itself, from figures it already holds. No server is watching your mileage, and nothing is sent anywhere to make a reminder happen.

A local notification depends on your phone, and there are several ordinary ways for one to be missed: notifications switched off for the app, a battery saver that suspends background work, the phone being off at the moment it was due, or the operating system simply deciding to delay it.

Check the notification permission in your device settings first. But the honest answer is that you should not rely on the app alone for something that matters. A reminder is a prompt, not a guarantee.

Yes, and it is worth the half hour. Backdated records count towards upkeep exactly as new ones do, so a stack of old invoices typed in is the single fastest way to move the score. The date and the mileage at the time are what matter; the notes are for you.

No, and this is the caveat most worth understanding. Recalls are matched on make, model and year. A campaign usually affects a range of serial numbers within a model year, not every car built that year, and the app cannot tell you which side of that range yours falls on.

So a result means "there is an open campaign affecting cars like yours, go and check". Your manufacturer or a franchised dealer can tell you whether your individual car is affected, from the VIN. We cannot.

Two public databases: the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the European Commission's Safety Gate. Both are asked for campaigns affecting your make, model and year, and neither is told who is asking.

The information is theirs, published in their own words, and we do not restate or translate it. It can be incomplete or out of date, and we cannot correct it.

To make the search work. Databases spell manufacturers their own way, and a car you saved as "VW Golf" does not match a record filed under "Volkswagen". If you have saved a VIN, opening the Recalls screen sends it to NHTSA's public decoder, which returns the make, model, year and trim as NHTSA themselves record them, and the search is run on those.

Your VIN goes nowhere else. It is never sent to the assistant, it does not feed the score, and it is optional. The app works without one, and the recall match is just looser.

No. It is an artificial intelligence model, and like all of them it can be confidently wrong, and can produce an answer that sounds specific to your car when it is not.

Check anything that matters before you act on it. Anything touching your safety is a reason to speak to somebody qualified rather than to us.

Enough to answer about your car rather than about cars in general. When you send a message, these go with it:

• The make, model, trim, year, fuel type and odometer reading.
• The health score, and how it was reached.
• What the schedule says is due next, and what you have already logged.
• Any open safety recalls the app has found.
• The name you chose to be known by, your distance unit, and your language.

That is the whole list. It is set out formally in the Privacy Policy.

None of the three. Nor your email address, nor what you paid for the car, nor anything about any other vehicle on your account.

The VIN is worth spelling out: it is stripped before the message leaves your phone, and that is true both of a VIN you typed and of one an OBD-II scan read off the car itself. It identifies the physical vehicle and adds nothing the make, model and year do not.

No. The provider that writes the reply is bound by contract to process your message only in order to answer it, and is not permitted to use it to train their models or for any purpose of their own.

Yes, a number of messages a day, and it is higher on Pro. The limit is what keeps the assistant available and affordable for everybody rather than spent by a handful of accounts, and it resets daily.

We count how many messages your account sends. The count is a number per day; it does not record what you asked.

Yes, on your account rather than on one phone, so a conversation is still there on your next device. You can delete them, and deleting your account deletes them with it.

It reads what your car has recorded about itself: its stored, pending and permanent fault codes, whether the check engine light is on and how many faults are behind it, and live sensor readings such as engine speed, coolant temperature, fuel level and battery voltage.

The point of having it inside GearGenius rather than in a generic code reader is that a code weighed against this car's mileage, history and score is a more useful answer than the code on its own.

Yes. You need an OBD-II adapter that plugs into the port under your dashboard, usually near the steering column. It is a separate piece of hardware, we do not make it, we do not sell it, and we do not endorse any particular one.

It must be a Bluetooth LE adapter. Check the listing says "BLE", "Bluetooth 4.0" or later. The very cheap ELM327 in most people's glovebox is Bluetooth Classic, and that one works on Android and cannot be made to work on an iPhone at all.

The reason is not ours to fix: iOS will not open a Classic serial link to an accessory that is not certified under Apple's MFi programme, and there is no API to request, no entitlement, and no workaround. Bluetooth LE needs no certification on either phone, so a BLE adapter is the only kind that can work on both.

WiFi adapters are not supported either, for a different reason: the adapter is the access point, so your phone loses its route to the internet while connected, which would cut the network at exactly the moment you wanted to ask the assistant about what it found.

No. The app only ever reads. It does not clear fault codes, does not write anything to your vehicle, and cannot change how your vehicle behaves.

That is deliberate. Clearing a code does not fix anything; it erases the evidence a mechanic would have used, and the light comes back.

No. A code names a circuit or a symptom, not a cause and not a repair. The same code can come from the part it names, from the wiring to it, or from something upstream of both.

And a car with no stored codes can still have something wrong with it. What the app makes of a code is guidance, exactly as everywhere else.

No. A scan is held in memory while the app is open, it is never saved to your account, never uploaded to us, and it is gone when you sign out or close the app. Nothing is kept as history, so the app cannot show you what your car said last month.

We would not. Plugging anything into a diagnostic port is at your own risk, some adapters draw current with the ignition off and can flatten a battery over a few days, and the port is a live connection to the systems that run the car. Plug it in to scan, then take it out.

It asks the map service already on your phone: Apple Maps on an iPhone, Google Places on an Android phone. They are sent the point you are searching from and the kind of place you are looking for, and nothing else. Not your name, not your account, not anything about your car. What comes back is not stored.

No. It shows you shops near you that are likely to have what you are after. It does not fetch prices, it does not check stock, and it is not a diagnosis of what your car needs. If you intend to fit a part yourself, do so only with the proper knowledge and tools.

No, and it is not a substitute for one. It puts an emergency number in front of you, shows it to you before anything happens, and hands it to your phone's own dialler if you confirm. The call is an ordinary telephone call made by your phone.

The number is chosen from the region your phone is set to, so it can be wrong if you are travelling or your device region does not match where you are. You can set it yourself in Settings. In a real emergency, dial the local number directly if there is any doubt at all.

No. Your position is read on the phone at the moment you ask for it, used to find what is around you or to write the message you are about to send, and then dropped. It is never stored on your account, never attached to a vehicle, and never sent to us.

Sharing your location works the same way: the app writes a message saying where you are and hands it to your phone's own share sheet. You choose who gets it and you press send. It is a snapshot of that moment, not a link that keeps following you.

One vehicle, and almost everything the app does to it: the health score, the full maintenance schedule and history, reminders, safety recalls, running costs, Part Finder, Nearby, SOS, and the assistant at a standard daily allowance.

The free tier is not a trial with the useful parts removed. It is the app, for one car.

• Up to five vehicles instead of one.
• A stronger assistant, with a higher daily allowance.
• Trade-In Oracle, a value range with its working shown.
• Second Opinion, which reads a repair quote against your own logged history.
• Pre-Purchase Check, a guided walkaround of a car you are thinking of buying.
• OBD-II diagnostics, under Car Insights.

The price is shown to you in the app before you subscribe, in your own currency and including whatever tax applies where you are. That figure comes from your own app store rather than from us.

We deliberately do not quote a price on this website. Until the subscription is live in both stores, any number here would be one you could not actually pay.

Apple or Google, in their own store, under their own terms and their own privacy policies. We never see and never hold your card number, your bank details or your billing address. What we hold is whether your account has a subscription, which one, and when it runs out.

In your own store account, in the subscription settings of your Apple or Google account. We cannot cancel it for you.

Two things people get caught by: a subscription renews automatically unless you turn renewal off at least 24 hours before the term ends, and deleting your GearGenius account does not cancel it. Cancel first, then delete.

You keep Pro until the end of the term you have paid for, and then the account returns to the free tier. Nothing is deleted. Vehicles beyond the free tier's one become read-only, and they come straight back if you subscribe again.

Refunds are handled by Apple or Google under their own policies, and we cannot issue one. Ask your store. If we ever end your access for a reason that is not your fault, we will refund the unused part of anything you paid us directly.

No. We never have, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising either. That is why you will not find a Do Not Sell link anywhere in the app: it would point at a switch that is already off.

None. No ad network, no analytics broker, no advertising identifier, no cookies, and no tracking technology of any kind. Nothing follows you to other apps or websites, and we do not measure what you look at inside the app.

This website is the same: no cookies, no analytics, no third-party scripts. That is why it has never asked you to accept anything.

No. A picture you take or choose is saved into the app's own storage on the device, and only a reference to it is stored on your account. The picture itself never leaves the phone.

Photos are also re-encoded before they are saved, which strips the location your camera wrote into the file.

Five, and every one of them is optional. Refusing any leaves the rest of the app working, and you can change your mind later from Settings or from your device settings.

• Camera, to scan a VIN barcode and photograph your car.
• Photos, to choose an existing picture.
• Notifications, for service reminders.
• Location, for Nearby, Part Finder and SOS, and nothing else.
• Bluetooth, only to talk to an OBD-II adapter. It is not used to find your location.

On secured servers run by service providers on our behalf, which may be in a country other than the one you live in, including the United States. Where data leaves the UK or the EEA it travels under the safeguards the law requires. Write to us and we will tell you which apply to you.

The full picture is in the Privacy Policy, which is one page and reads like one.

From inside the app: Settings, then your name at the top, then Delete my account. It asks you twice, and then it is gone. Or write to us and we will do it, at any time and without your giving a reason.

Everything is deleted within 30 days. Nothing is held back for marketing, because we do not market to you. Remember to cancel a subscription first: deleting the account does not cancel it.

Yes, wherever you live. Write to privacy@geargenius.app and it opens a ticket. We answer within one month, or 45 days for a request made under a United States state law. It costs nothing.

The same address is how you ask for something to be corrected, restricted or deleted. The full list of rights is in the Privacy Policy.

Nothing is lost. Your garage and history stay on your account until you ask us to remove them, and they are there when you sign back in on any phone. An OBD-II scan is the one exception: it is held in memory only, so signing out discards it.

13. GearGenius is not intended for children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data. Where you live, the age at which you can agree to a contract on your own may be higher, and below it you may use the app only with a parent or guardian who accepts the terms with you.

Check the odometer reading first. It is the input most likely to be stale, and it feeds a factor worth 20 points as well as the whole schedule.

Then open the breakdown. The app shows which of the five factors took points off and by how much, so a score that looks wrong usually turns out to be one factor you did not expect. Most often it is upkeep, where a type of service you have never logged reads as one you are not keeping on top of.

Distances are held in miles internally and converted, so a metric owner sees intervals at exact conversions rather than at round numbers: a 6,000-mile rotation reads as 9,656 km, and a projection can land on a figure like "due in 7,313 km". That is correct arithmetic rather than a bug.

If a date rather than a distance looks wrong, it is usually a service logged with the wrong year on it.

In order of how often it turns out to be the cause: the adapter is Bluetooth Classic rather than BLE (see above, and on an iPhone this one cannot be fixed), the ignition is not on, the Bluetooth permission was refused, or the adapter is still paired to another phone.

The app finds an adapter's serial pipe by what it can do rather than by a fixed identifier, so an unlisted BLE dongle will usually work. Unlisted is not the problem; Classic is.

Either the location permission is refused, the phone has no position fix yet, or there genuinely is nothing of that kind within the search radius. The search runs against the map service on your phone, so a category with no results near you returns none rather than reaching further.

Enter the closest match and correct the trim by hand. The make list drives the reliability factor, worth 10 points; a make that is not on it is scored neutrally rather than badly, so an unusual car is not penalised for being unusual.