Blapp - Black-owned businesses 4+

This app is pretty amazing because it’s locally based wherever you are! It will show you more Black-owned businesses than you knew existed. I use it to find restaurants and also boutiques near me. I’ve also found amazing skin and hair care products from Black creators through Blapp.

Love the new community features too, can’t wait to learn from my friends and follow other Blappers!

I can imagine that verifying and keeping up to date with Black owned businesses is a challenge, and unfortunately this app proves this to be true. The first several restaurants listed near me were found to not be Black owned at all. As I scrolled through the list, the insufficient algorithm pulls up anything with the word “Black” in the name; “Black Bear Diner”, “Black Eyed Pea” etc. Also, the app seems to favor mostly restaurants. What’s clear is that the creators of this great idea do not yet have the structure or bandwidth to make sure that what’s listed on their app are in fact Black owned businesses.

That being said, I was able to find several Black owned restaurants that I was not aware of after opening the app (which was better than a Google search), so I’m giving this app a generous 3 stars. The problem, of course, is that I can’t trust what the app is telling me, so I have to do the research for each listed business myself, which is what I was hoping the app would do for me. I am grateful someone has endeavored to create something like this, so I am rooting for their success and will try to continue using the app and flag the non-Black owned businesses along the way (which we do have the capability to do in the app) so their list can hopefully become more accurate along the way.

The initial list that appears when I open the app shows black-owned restaurants across Chicago. But I was disappointed to discover that as soon as I select a category it just shows me all nearby businesses of that type, most or all of which are white-owned. Within certain categories there are a few businesses I know to be black-owned, but there is no way to distinguish those from the others within the app. I wish the best to the developers of this app and hope it evolves to match its intended purpose.