Florian Born isn’t the type of person who likes complaining. So when the designer started bumping into potholes as he cycled around Berlin, he wasn’t going to call up the city to tell it where to send its repair truck.

He had a better idea: make an app that would take care of the process for him.

Auto-Complain works with a phone’s accelerometer to identify bumps in the road. When users ride over the obstacle, the app maps the location, then sends a signal to an onboard paint gun that sprays a mark on the road. When riders complete their journey, it also generates a PDF that’s sent automatically to a city road department.

No need for any long letters or phone calls.

“If you make it available for lots of people, you get statistics on where the most problems are and where is the highest density of bike riders facing problems,” Born says. “That’s a good thing for riders and the government because they don’t have to manually look for potholes.”

Riders can set the app to be more or less sensitive, depending on what they consider to be a disturbance. Born, 25, sees the system mainly for actual bike lanes rather than open roads, though it could be used for that as well. The paint is chalk-based and nonpermanent, much like the stuff repair teams use anyway.