Terms of use

Who is "we"?

DodoLingo is made by HTF Publishing Inc. This page is the agreement between you and us about the app. It is not an agreement with Apple. Installing or using DodoLingo means you accept it.

Questions go through the form on the support page.

Your licence to use the app

We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use DodoLingo on any Apple device you own or control, as allowed by Apple's Usage Rules in the App Store Terms of Service. You get one copy of the app per device, and family sharing, where Apple allows it, is Apple's to allow.

This is a licence, not a sale. We keep ownership of the app, its code, its design, its name and the dictionaries inside it. Everything we have not given you here, we have kept.

What you agree not to do

• Copy, sell, rent, sublicense or redistribute the app or the dictionaries it ships with.
• Reverse engineer, decompile or take the app apart, except where the law where you live says you may do so anyway, in which case the law wins.
• Use the app to break the law, or to break YouTube's terms.
• Strip out or paper over the notices that say who made this.

These are the ordinary ones. The point of them is that the app stays ours and stays whole, not that we intend to come after somebody curious about how it works.

Where does the video come from?

We host no video, none at all. Video plays from YouTube through YouTube's official embedded player, and it stays subject to the YouTube terms of service and the Google privacy policy the whole time it is on your screen. We do not choose what is on YouTube, we do not moderate it, and we cannot promise a video you liked will still be there tomorrow, because taking it down is the uploader's decision and YouTube's, not ours.

Lessons are built on your device, out of the video's own subtitles. That has one consequence worth stating plainly: a video with no subtitles cannot become a lesson. It is not a bug, and no amount of retrying will fix it.

Please do not expect the app to work offline. Dictionary lookups do, because the dictionaries are on the phone; playback does not, because the video is not.

What does a subscription actually buy?

The free app gives you five minutes of watching a day, metered as time you actually watched rather than time the app was open. A subscription lifts that daily limit. That is all it does. No lesson, no language and no feature is held back from the free app, so the thing you are buying is more minutes and nothing else. We would rather say that here than let you find it out afterwards.

There are two products: a monthly one, and a yearly one that starts with a free week. Prices are whatever the App Store shows you in your own currency, which is why no price is written on this page or inside the app.

How billing works, and who does it

Apple does it. We do not.

• Payment is charged to your Apple Account when you confirm the purchase.
• A subscription renews automatically unless you cancel it at least 24 hours before the current period ends.
• Renewal is charged within 24 hours of the end of the current period, at the price the App Store shows for the new one.
• You manage and cancel subscriptions in your Apple Account settings. Deleting the app does not cancel anything.
• If you cancel during a free week, you are not charged, and the week runs to its end.

Refunds are Apple's too. Ask for one at reportaproblem.apple.com. We cannot issue a refund for a purchase we never took the money for, and telling you to ask us instead would only waste your time.

The app is provided as is

DodoLingo is provided as is and as available, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement, to the fullest extent the law where you live allows. Some places do not allow that exclusion, and where they do not, this paragraph does not apply to you.

In plain words: we think it is good, we use it ourselves, and we still cannot promise it will never crash, never mistranslate a word, never lose a streak or always find the video you wanted. It teaches you English from videos. Please do not rely on it for anything where being wrong would hurt.

What we are not liable for

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss arising from your use of the app, and our total liability to you is limited to what you paid us for DodoLingo in the twelve months before the claim. For most people that is nothing, because the app is free, and we are not going to pretend that number is larger than it is.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, and in some places that includes quite a lot.

Ending this agreement

You end it by deleting the app, which also deletes everything the app kept on your phone. There is nothing to close, because there was never an account to open.

We can end it if you break these terms in a way that matters. We can also stop making DodoLingo, or stop supporting an older version of it, and we would be telling you a comforting untruth if we promised otherwise. An active subscription in that situation is Apple's to sort out, through the refund link above.

Apple's part in this

Apple requires us to say a few things, and they are true, so here they are.

• This agreement is between you and us. It is not with Apple, and Apple is not responsible for DodoLingo or its contents.
• Support is ours. Apple has no obligation to provide any maintenance or support for the app.
• If the app fails to conform to any warranty that cannot be disclaimed, you may tell Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price. Beyond that refund, Apple has no warranty obligation at all, and anything else is ours to answer for.
• Any claim about the app, including product liability, a failure to meet a legal requirement, or a consumer protection claim, is ours to handle rather than Apple's.
• If somebody claims the app infringes their intellectual property, defending that claim is ours.
• You confirm you are not in a country under a United States embargo or designated as supporting terrorism, and that you are not on a United States prohibited or restricted parties list.
• Apple and its subsidiaries are third party beneficiaries of this agreement, and may enforce it against you.

Children

DodoLingo is not aimed at children under 13. The video comes from YouTube, which has content of every kind on it, and the video is chosen by whoever is holding the phone. If you are a parent deciding whether this is suitable, that sentence is the one to weigh.

Privacy

What the app keeps on your phone and what it sends is in the privacy policy, which is part of these terms.

Which law applies?

The consumer law of the country you bought the app in. That law follows you, it cannot be signed away by a page like this one, and we are not going to name a distant court here to suggest otherwise.

If something has gone wrong, tell us through the form on the support page first. It is a language app, and almost everything can be sorted out that way.

Changes to these terms

If these terms change, the date at the top changes with them, and the version at this address is always the current one. Carrying on using the app after a change means you accept the new version. If you do not, delete the app.