Michael Novaria’s wife was cursing when she burst through the door. It was the first snowstorm of the year, and her car was stuck on Hampstead Road, just down the hill from their house in Jamaica Plain.

So Novaria did what any devoted husband would do: He grabbed his iPhone.

Stalking outside in the snow, he snapped a picture of their street and uploaded it to City Hall. Before long, a snowplow came roaring by. Who needs a shovel in the age of the smartphone?

Tech-savvy Bostonians who already use their iPhones to send Tweets, select a wine, and play Tetris, now find that they can also employ the latest technology for something much more basic: alerting city officials to potholes, burned-out streetlights, graffiti, and other signs of urban decay.

About 2,500 Bostonians have downloaded Citizens Connect, the city of Boston’s official iPhone application for reporting street-level problems, since its debut in October, according to the mayor’s office.

Those residents have reported more than 750 complaints. There was the photo of trash bags hauled to the curb on the wrong day in Beacon Hill, the spray paint covering a bus stop in East Boston, and a rattling metal plate on Massachusetts Avenue in the South End that woke up Tom Kozlek at night.

“I feel like if I send them something, it will actually get done, as opposed to the other way of doing it, which would be to call them and report it,’’ said Kozlek, 29, a Boston University Medical School student, who said he also uses the iPhone application to report potholes he sees while biking to his girlfriend’s home in the Fenway. Often, the city fills the hole within a day or two, he said.

“Pretty much any pothole between my apartment and my girlfriend’s apartment gets reported,’’ he said.