I will review some of the recent work on the RR Lyrae populations in Local Volume galaxies. The capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope and 10-meter class ground-based telescopes have made it possible to reliably identify and characterize RR Lyrae variables out to a few Mpc. This is important because RR Lyraes are the 'Swiss Army knives' of astronomy in the sense that they have multiple and varied uses for probing the formation and evolution of galaxies. I will describe the diversity of ways that RR Lyraes are useful in this regard and what they reveal about the properties of galaxies such as M31, M32, and M33.