Terms of Use
Using the app
By installing Hatch you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use it.
You are responsible for what you put into the vault, for keeping your device secure, and for obeying the laws that apply to you where you are.
The agreement is between you and Ahmad Mansour, the developer of Hatch ("we"), reachable at lowkey9.ai@gmail.com. It is not an agreement with Apple or Google or with the store you installed from.
Who may use it
You need to be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and at least the minimum age of the store you installed from. If you are under that age, an adult responsible for you has to agree to these terms on your behalf. You also confirm that you are not located in a country subject to a United States Government embargo, or designated by it as a "terrorist supporting" country, and that you are not on any United States Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
If you are using the app on a device that belongs to an employer or someone else, make sure you are allowed to.
What you may do with it
You get a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use the app on devices you own or control, for as long as these terms hold. That licence is what you have; you are not buying the software itself.
Do not resell it, rent it, or pass it off as your own, and do not strip out or alter the notices in it. You may reverse-engineer it only as far as the law where you live specifically allows, which in most places it does.
This is not a licence to the third-party open-source components inside the app. Those keep their own licences, which are listed in the app.
Your secret and your recovery phrase
The app is built so that only you can open your vault. We hold no copy of your PIN, password, pattern or recovery phrase, and no readable copy of your data — including in cloud backup, if you use it.
This means we cannot let you back in. If you lose your secret and your recovery phrase, the contents of the vault are unrecoverable — by you, by us, and by anyone else, and that includes any cloud backup of it. Write the recovery phrase down when it is shown to you, and keep it somewhere safe.
What is yours stays yours
Everything you put into the vault remains yours. We claim no ownership of it and no licence over it, and we could not use it if we wanted to: it is encrypted with a key we do not have, both on your device and in a cloud backup if you keep one.
The app itself, its name, its icons and its design remain ours.
What you may not do with it
Do not use Hatch to hold or move material that is illegal to possess where you are — child sexual abuse material above all, and equally stolen data, material that infringes someone else's rights, or anything you are keeping in order to threaten or harm another person.
Do not use it to obstruct an investigation or to destroy evidence you are legally required to preserve. Privacy is a right; the app is not a tool for defeating a lawful obligation, and nothing in it is designed for that.
Do not attack the app, the device it runs on or the cloud backup service: no tampering with the build, no repackaging it under another name, no distributing a modified copy as if it were ours, no attempts to reach anyone else's account or backup, and no attempts to overload or get around the limits of the service.
We cannot see what is in your vault, so these limits are not enforced by us — they are your undertaking, and the consequences of breaking them come from the law, not from us.
The disguise features
The app can wear a different launcher icon and can be set up with a decoy vault. These are privacy features, offered for the ordinary case of handing your unlocked phone to someone. They are not a defence against forensic examination, and nothing in the app should be relied on to mislead an authority you are legally obliged to answer to.
Which of them exist at all depends on the platform and on the build you installed: on some platforms an app cannot remove its own icon at all, and store policy keeps the strongest hiding out of the store versions. The app tells you what it can and cannot do on your phone rather than pretending the difference away.
The features that react to an intruder
The app can log failed unlock attempts, photograph whoever is holding the phone after one, lock itself for longer each time, and — only if you switch it on — destroy its keys after enough failures or on a duress code.
Two things follow, and both are yours to weigh before you turn any of it on. Photographing a person may be regulated where you live, and the app cannot know who that person is: a partner, a child, or you, half-asleep, entering the wrong PIN. And a wipe is a wipe — it is instant, it is silent, it is not recoverable, and it does not check first, because a wipe that asked "are you sure?" would defeat its own purpose.
Each of these is off by default. Turning one on is a decision, and the app describes what it does before you make it.
Backups are your job
The vault is deliberately excluded from the phone's own backups to iCloud or Google, so a new phone restored from one will not contain it. Use the app's own encrypted export, or the optional cloud backup, and check now and then that you can actually restore what you saved.
A backup nobody has ever restored is a rumour. Cloud backup is a convenience on top of your own backups, not a replacement for them: keep your recovery phrase, and keep an export you control.
What we provide
The app is provided as is. We work to keep it reliable but do not promise it will be error-free or always available, and we are not liable for data you lose through a forgotten secret, a deleted app, a lost device, or a failure of the device's own storage. Keep your own backups of anything you cannot afford to lose.
We also do not promise that the app will meet a particular legal or safety need of yours. If your situation is dangerous, please treat this app as one small part of a plan and not as the plan. If you are a consumer in the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, the law gives you a right to an app and a service that conform to what was described, and to remedies if they do not; nothing in these terms limits that right.
The limits of what we owe you
To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost data or lost profit, or for anything arising from your use of the app or of cloud backup; and where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to what you paid us, subscriptions included, in the twelve months before the claim.
Some countries do not allow parts of that to be excluded, and where that is so, this section does not apply to you. Nothing here limits liability for death, personal injury, or fraud, and nothing here takes away rights you have as a consumer.
Purchases
The app itself is free to use. The optional cloud backup is sold as a subscription through the App Store or Google Play, under that store's terms, and paid to the store from your store account. We never see your card details.
Refunds are decided by the store you paid, under its refund policy; we cannot issue them ourselves. Your rights as a consumer where you live are not affected. If you live in the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you may withdraw from a subscription within 14 days of buying it, without giving a reason. Because the App Store or Google Play sells and bills it, you withdraw through its own refund or withdrawal procedure, which applies that right; if you asked for the service to start straight away and used it during those 14 days, the refund may be reduced in proportion to what you received.
Cloud backup subscriptions
Cloud backup needs an account and an active subscription. Plans differ in how much they store and are billed monthly or yearly. The price, in your currency, is shown by the store before you confirm, and payment is charged to your store account when you confirm the purchase.
A subscription renews automatically at the end of each period, at the price then in force, unless you turn off auto-renewal at least 24 hours before the period ends. You manage and cancel it in your store account's subscription settings. Deleting the app, or your Hatch account, does not cancel it.
Your plan's storage is a limit, not a target: once a backup would exceed it, backing up stops until you free space or change plan. Restoring is included and metered by a restore allowance: it starts at one full download of your plan's storage, grows by a twelfth of that for each paid month, and never exceeds two full downloads. Backing up is limited to uploading twice your plan's storage in any 30 days, and to one stored item per 500 KB of your plan's storage (100,000 items on 50 GB). The service is for backing up and restoring your own vault from the app; automated access from outside the app, or use as general file storage or to distribute content, may be throttled or suspended.
When a subscription ends, backing up stops, restoring stays possible for 30 days, and after that the backup is deleted. We may also delete a backup, and close the account, if these terms are seriously broken.
We work to keep the service available and your backup intact, but we do not guarantee it against loss, interruption, or the service ending. If we ever stop offering cloud backup we will tell you in the app at least 30 days ahead, so you can restore and stop renewing. A cloud backup cannot be opened on a new phone without your recovery phrase, and we cannot open it for you: keep the phrase, and keep a backup of your own.
The stores you installed from
The store you installed from and the company that runs it (Apple or Google) are not parties to these terms and have no obligation to provide support or maintenance for the app. Any claim about the app — that it does not work, that it infringes someone's rights, that it fails a legal requirement — is ours to answer, not theirs.
For the iOS version, Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms and may enforce them against you. In the event of any failure of the app to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price of the app, if any, to you; to the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation with respect to the app. Your use of the app must also comply with the terms of the store you installed from.
Updates, and features that come and go
We may update the app, add features, and remove ones that turn out to be unsafe, unmaintainable, or against a store's rules. Where a feature disappears we will say so, rather than letting you find out by looking for it.
Your device or its operating system may also stop being supported, which is a limit on us as much as on you.
Ending it
You end these terms by deleting the app and, if you have one, your account. Without an account nothing is left with us, because nothing was ever with us.
We may end them if you break them in a way that matters. Without an account that means little: there is nothing for us to close and no remote switch for us to throw. With one, we may close the account and delete its backup, after giving notice where the law requires it. The sections about liability, ownership and the law survive the end of the agreement.
The law that applies
These terms are governed by the law of the place where the developer is established, and disputes belong to the courts there. If you use the app as a consumer, that does not remove the protections of the law where you live, or your right to bring a claim in your own country.
Please write to us first. Almost everything that becomes a dispute started as a question nobody answered.
Changes
We may update these terms. The effective date above tells you when they last changed.
A change that materially affects what you may do or what we owe you will be surfaced in the app; continuing to use the app after that means you accept it. If you do not, delete the app.
Contact
Questions about these terms go to lowkey9.ai@gmail.com, the same address as Settings → Help & support.