Will the handyman app arrive in the Netherlands soon?

You can see him in the movie Missing, but he also occasionally appears in the American series: Handyman Apps. We don’t mean Werkspot, where you can hire a carpenter, or Fiverr, where someone can make a logo for you. We mean an “all-tasking” app like Taskrabbit. Something that’s already big in the US, but it doesn’t even exist in the Netherlands yet. Too bad, because it exists in other countries. However, there may be hope on the horizon.

a task

Taskrabbit is so great because you can do a lot with it: whether you’re a job applicant or someone who wants to do the task. In Missing, a young woman asks someone to make inquiries at a hotel abroad via a Taskrabbit-like app after her mother disappears. In the end, the best man does his best to do all kinds of jobs for her.

Or yes, odd jobs: asking about things, then inquiring elsewhere, and so on. But you can also use Taskrabbit to ask people to help you move, or to get a message for you at the supermarket. Cleaning, collecting medications, assembling furniture, and even brushing your horse if you can’t do it yourself. You can go in all kinds of directions with it, and that’s what makes it so great. If you can’t open a jar of peanut butter, so to speak, or want help installing your new smart bulb, you can ask someone via this app. We have Zoofy in the Netherlands, but it focuses a bit on manual jobs.

Uber is a chore

It’s a shame we don’t have Taskrabbit, because it was acquired by IKEA in 2017. So you might think that European expansion should follow soon. There is now also some availability in European countries, but we simply don’t have it yet. However, there may be an open door, but not at IKEA. In another big four-letter company: Uber. In addition to its “transportation” business, Uber already has Uber Eats, a type of home delivery service (although it is still much smaller in terms of offering in the Netherlands). Maybe just the “chore” was added. Chore won’t necessarily come to the Netherlands right away, but it’s something Uber is working on around the world.

Chore means “chore” and the idea is that you can hire people to do the above things for you or offer yourself for all kinds of jobs. Programmer Steve Moser told Bloomberg he found something in the code for Chore in the Uber app on iOS. You can hire someone for at least an hour using this: So this doesn’t apply to any job, unless you have a full arsenal of jobs. It would be interesting to have something like this in our country. However, it is not yet certain whether it will come to a single country: just because something is in the code does not always mean that the functionality will actually be available.

Start up bigger

However, it would be great, especially if a big, well-known company is starting something. In the Netherlands it is very difficult to create an app and keep it successful: there are many initiatives that often fail. If it were backed by Uber, there would certainly be more seed capital behind it. However, this chore can be given a whole new life.