Terms of Service

By using Uchi (“the app”), you agree to these terms. Uchi is made and provided by Enes Kırgıl, an independent developer working alone — there is no company behind it. If you don’t agree with these terms, please don’t use the app.

What Uchi is

Uchi is a private shared notebook for one household: lists, chores, bills, routines, plans and a family calendar, meals, board notes, savings goals, home and pet care, keepsakes, the family’s papers, a quiet food log, and similar everyday family content. It exists to help a family organise daily life together.

Uchi is not a banking, payment, medical, emergency, or professional record-keeping service, and you shouldn’t rely on it as one. Anything the app calculates or suggests — a split on a bill, a converted currency amount, an amount read from a photo of a bill, a weather forecast, a recipe idea, a suggested daily amount of food energy — is a convenience, not an authoritative figure. Check it before you act on it. You are responsible for the accuracy of what you enter or accept.

That last one deserves more than a line, so it gets the next section. It is the most important part of this document.

Uchi is not a medical device

Uchi can keep a food log and show a suggested daily amount of food energy (kcal). That suggestion is arithmetic and nothing more: a standard textbook formula (Mifflin-St Jeor) applied to the height, weight, birthday, activity level and one formula constant that somebody typed in themselves. It knows nothing else about the person — not their health, not their medication, not whether they are pregnant, unwell, recovering, growing, training, or eating for two.

So, plainly:

• Uchi is not a medical device, and it is not regulated as one.
• Uchi gives no medical, dietary, nutritional or clinical advice. Nothing in it is a recommendation about what anyone should eat, or how much.
• The suggested number is a rough guide you can change or ignore — not a target anyone has to reach, and not a limit anyone is failing to stay under. Uchi never tells anybody they ate too much or too little, and it never rewards anyone for eating less. That is deliberate.
• The kcal figures come from what your family types in and from a public product database that volunteers maintain. They are approximate, and sometimes they are simply wrong.
• Please don’t use Uchi to manage a medical condition — diabetes, kidney disease, an allergy, pregnancy, an eating disorder, anything — and don’t use it to decide on a treatment, a diet, or a change in what someone eats. A doctor or a registered dietitian can look at the actual person, which an app cannot.
• If you are worried about your own eating, or about somebody else’s, please talk to a doctor rather than to a number on a phone. If someone may be in danger, contact your local emergency services.

And a word about children. A growing child’s needs are not what this formula was built for. Uchi shows no suggested number at all to a child under thirteen — only the log — and a child cannot switch a food log on for themselves. If you are an adult thinking about turning it on for your child, please think about it as a parent first: a calorie number in front of a young person can do real harm, and a doctor or a dietitian is the right person to ask before anyone starts counting. Uchi has no goals, no streaks, no scores, and nothing at all that congratulates a small total — but that is the limit of what an app can do. The rest is you.

Who can use it, and the adult’s role

• An adult sets up the household, with their own email address and password, and invites the rest of the family. Adults control household permissions, approvals and content.
• Anyone old enough to hold their own account signs up for themselves — a teenager, a grandparent, a guest — by joining with the invite code and creating an account with their own address and password. When you do that, you are agreeing to these terms for yourself.
• A child does not sign up, and is never asked for an email address or a password. Their account is created for them by an adult in the household, and that adult agrees to these terms on the child’s behalf. The next section is that agreement, in full.
• You must be old enough to agree to these terms yourself. That age is not the same everywhere — it is thirteen in some countries and sixteen in others, including Germany. Uchi does not try to work out anyone’s age from a birthday it cannot check. If you are a parent and you are not sure which side of the line someone in your home falls on, create their account for them rather than sending them the invite code. That is the safe answer, and nothing in the app is worse for it.

Uchi is meant to be used by families, including children, under the supervision of a parent or guardian. If you are the adult who set up the household, you are responsible for how the household uses the app — including children and any guests you invite — and for the content that appears in it.

Children’s accounts, and what a parent is agreeing to

This section is the agreement a parent makes when they add a child. It is short because the arrangement is simple, and it matters more than its length suggests.

How a child’s account is made. An adult adds a child from inside their own signed-in account, in the Family tab. Before anything is created, Uchi shows the whole of what is being agreed to on one page, and the button that finishes it is not labelled “OK” — it says “I’m [name]’s parent or guardian, and I agree to this.” Uchi then shows a one-time eight-digit setup code; on the child’s phone, that code and the child’s own PIN open their profile. The code works once and stops working after seven days, and a parent can issue a new one at any time.

By doing that, you confirm two things: that you are the parent or legal guardian of that child, and that you agree to these terms, the Privacy Policy and the License on their behalf. Uchi cannot check whether you are a child’s guardian; that is why the record it keeps of your agreement — which documents, which versions, in which language, when, by you, for that child — is what stands behind it. Please do not tick that box for a child who is not yours to speak for.

What Uchi collects from a child: nothing. No email address, no password, no phone number, no location, no advertising identifier. Uchi has no way to contact a child and never sends one a message. Everything on a child’s profile is either typed by an adult or made by the child inside their own family’s home. The Privacy Policy sets out the list item by item.

What you keep, as the parent. You can see everything Uchi holds about your child, change any of it, move their account to a different phone, set a new PIN, change their role, and remove them from the household entirely — which deletes their profile and everything attached to it, including their food log. Removing the child is also how you withdraw the consent you gave here, and it takes a few taps rather than a letter. If you would rather have a copy of everything first, or would rather it were done for you, write to [email protected].

A child agrees to nothing. No legal document is ever put in front of a child to accept. If these terms change, the adults re-accept, and a parent’s acceptance covers the children they set up.

One honest thing about a child’s account. Because a child has no email address and no password, there is nothing for them to forget and nothing for anyone to steal — but there is also no way for them to prove who they are. If a child’s phone is lost or wiped, the way back is a parent issuing a new setup code from their own account. That is by design, and it means at least one adult in the household must be able to sign in. Keep your own password somewhere safe.

Your invite code is a shared secret

Anyone who has your household’s six-digit invite code can join your household and see what is in it. The code is now worth more than it used to be: somebody who uses it ends up with a real account of their own inside your home, not a device that forgets you when it is wiped. Share it only with people you actually want in your home, send it the way you would send a house key, and check the member list if you’re unsure. Adults can remove a member at any time. Keeping the code private is your responsibility.

How you sign in

Every grown-up in a household signs in with an email address and a password. Uchi used to sign your phone in anonymously and ask for nothing at all; that promise is gone, and it is worth saying why rather than letting you notice. An anonymous sign-in lives on exactly one device, so a phone that was lost, broken, stolen or wiped took the household with it, for good, and nobody could hand it back. An account is the way a home outlives a phone.

What this means for you, practically:

• You choose the address and the password, and you are responsible for both. Use an address you will still have in five years, and a password you use nowhere else — at least ten characters. If your phone offers to invent one and remember it, let it.
• Your address has to be confirmed before it counts for anything. Uchi mails six digits to it and you type them back into the app. An unconfirmed address is not a route back to anything.
• Uchi never stores your password. It goes to the sign-in service, which keeps only a scrambled, one-way value. Nobody at Uchi can read your password, and nobody at Uchi can tell you what it was.
• If you forget it, Uchi mails six digits to your address and you set a new password in the app. The same mail carries a link to the password page on this site, which does the same job in a browser. Either way, the address on your account is the only way back in — so if you lose access to that mailbox as well as your password, there may be nothing anyone can do.
• Two-step sign-in with an authenticator app is optional — a six-digit code asked for on top of the password. If you lose the authenticator, there is no back door. A second factor a support email could switch off would not be a second factor. Save whatever backup codes your authenticator app offers, and keep them somewhere other than the phone you are protecting. If it goes wrong anyway, write to [email protected] — but please do not read that as a promise of a way in. There may not be one; the only other route is somebody still inside the household reading you the invite code.
• Children sign in with a setup code and a PIN, and have no address and no password at all — see the children’s accounts section above.

Agreeing to these documents is part of making an account, and it is recorded. Before your account is created, Uchi shows you this document, the Privacy Policy and the License, and asks you to agree. What it keeps is: which document, which version of it, in which language you read it, when (by the server’s clock), who tapped, and who it was for — you, or a child you were consenting for. Nobody, including us, can edit or delete one of those records; the app can only add to them. The Privacy Policy sets it out field by field.

If your household existed before this version. Your old anonymous sign-in still works, and the app walks you through adding an address and a password to the account you already have. Nothing is moved, copied or re-created — it is the same home, upgraded in place. You cannot skip it, because a home with no way back is the exact problem this change exists to fix.

The food log, and what turning it on means

The food log is a quiet note of what somebody ate. For grown-ups it starts on, and any grown-up can switch their own off whenever they like. For children and for guests it starts off — and who may turn it on for them is a rule of the app itself, not a setting anyone can talk their way past.

• For yourself. A grown-up can switch their own log on and off whenever they like. Switching it off stops new entries; what is already logged stays yours, and stays visible to you.
• For a child. Only a grown-up in the household can switch a child’s log on. A child cannot do it for themselves — that is refused by the server, not merely hidden by a screen. If you are the grown-up who turns it on, you are making that choice on the child’s behalf, and you are accepting the section above on their behalf too. Please read it first.
• Grown-ups at home can see a child’s log, and the app says so on the child’s own screen rather than watching quietly. A grown-up’s log is theirs alone — not their partner’s business, not the household owner’s. Children never see each other’s.
• The daily number belongs to the person it is about. Nobody can write a daily amount into somebody else’s profile, a parent included. Under thirteen there is no number at all — just the log.

The body details, and what you are agreeing to store. For Uchi to offer a suggestion at all it needs weight, height, birthday, roughly how much the person moves, and one value used purely as a constant in the formula. Every one of them is optional, and if any is missing Uchi offers no suggestion rather than guessing at one. But be clear about what they are: these are health details about a named person — including, if you turn the log on for them, a child. They are stored in your household’s own rows, in the same database as everything else your family adds, under the same household-only rules — no better protected than the shopping list, and no worse. If that isn’t a trade you want to make, leave them blank, or leave the log off. Nothing else in Uchi changes.

Your family’s content is yours

Everything your family adds to Uchi — lists, notes, photos, voice notes, plans, journal entries, documents, food entries, and the rest — belongs to your family. Enes Kırgıl claims no ownership of it and no right to use it for anything else. It is stored and processed only to make the app work for you, as described in the Privacy Policy. It is never used for advertising, never used to train anything, and never sold.

In return, your family is responsible for what it adds. That includes having the right to add it — in particular photos of other people. Before you add a photo of someone, make sure you’re entitled to, and don’t put other people’s personal information into your household without their agreement.

Documents you import

Uchi has a shelf for the family’s papers — the boiler manual, an appliance warranty, an insurance policy, a school letter. You pick the file yourself and Uchi takes only what you hand it: PDF, JPEG, PNG or plain text, up to 20 MB each.

What goes on that shelf is entirely your family’s choice, and so is the responsibility for it:

• Only import what you have the right to import. If a document is about somebody else — a payslip, a medical form, a letter — add it only if they would be content for your household to hold it. The section above applies to documents in full.
• Who can read it. By default a document is visible to everyone in your household, children included — the shelf exists for the bin-collection notice and the boiler manual, which the whole family should be able to reach. A grown-up can mark a document grown-ups only, and that mark is a real boundary rather than a hidden card: a child then cannot see it, cannot open the file, and cannot reach it by guessing where it is kept. Only a grown-up can put that mark on or take it off. Anything left unmarked, every member of your household can read — so if a document shouldn’t be, mark it as you file it.
• Everyone with your invite code is in your household. A document on the shelf is available to whoever your family has let in.
• Editing and deleting. Anyone who can see a document can rename or recategorise it; replacing the file itself is limited to the person who filed it and to grown-ups. You can always delete something you filed, and a grown-up can delete anything they can see. Deleting takes the stored file with it.
• Uchi does not read, index, scan or analyse what your documents say — the Privacy Policy explains exactly how they are stored.

Acceptable use

Uchi is private to your own household — there is no feed, no public profile, and no community to moderate. Even so, please use it responsibly. You agree not to:

• Use Uchi for anything unlawful, or to store or share illegal content.
• Upload content you don’t have the right to use, or other people’s personal information without their agreement.
• Try to reach another household’s data, or to break, overload, probe, or reverse-engineer the app or the service behind it.
• Use the app to harass, harm, or exploit anyone, including children in your own household.
• Use what the app shows you about another person at home — a child’s food log, someone’s body details, a document on the shelf — to shame, pressure, or police them. Those things exist so a family can look after each other.

Widgets on the Home Screen and Lock Screen

Uchi has widgets. So that they can draw without the app running, Uchi keeps a small snapshot on the phone itself — the fridge note, today’s chores and dinner, what’s still to buy, who’s home. It never leaves the device, it is never sent anywhere, and it is cleared when the phone is no longer signed in to a household.

The snapshot deliberately carries nothing personal and nothing permission-gated: no food log, no bills or money, no documents, no journal entries. But there’s an honest consequence to a Lock Screen widget worth saying out loud: anyone holding the phone can read it without unlocking anything. The fridge note is the one that can be personal — “Grandma’s operation is Tuesday” glows exactly as brightly as “milk”. If that isn’t what you want, keep the widget on the Home Screen, or don’t add it at all.

Apple Health

Uchi can link the food log to Apple Health. It is off until you ask for it, one person at a time, and the link is narrow on purpose: the only thing Uchi ever asks Health for is dietary energy — the kcal in what was eaten. Nothing else. What it does with that is add the lines you logged in Uchi to Health, and look at today’s dietary energy from your other apps so the two don’t quietly disagree.

Health data is read and written on your device. Nothing from Health is sent to Uchi’s server or anywhere else, and nothing from it is kept on disk. Only your own lines ever go out to Health — a grown-up who can see a child’s log inside Uchi cannot push that child’s eating into their own Health store.

You can switch the link off inside Uchi, and you can take the permission away entirely in iOS Settings › Privacy & Security › Health or in the Health app, at any time, without telling us. Anything Uchi already added stays in Health afterwards: that is your own store to prune, and deleting from it out from under you isn’t ours to do.

Scanning — bills and barcodes

Uchi’s bill scanner reads a photo on your device to suggest an amount. It can misread. Always check any scanned amount before relying on it. You are responsible for the accuracy of financial figures you enter or accept.

The food barcode scanner works the same way, in the same place — on your phone. What the camera sees is read on the device and no image is uploaded anywhere; only the digits of the barcode are sent, and only to look the product up. A barcode that comes back with nothing is an ordinary answer: most home cooking, and plenty of real packets, simply aren’t in the database.

The supporter tip

At the foot of the About screen there is one optional supporter tip. It is exactly what it sounds like: a way to say thanks. It unlocks nothing, it is not a subscription and does not renew, and Uchi is completely functional without it. There is no paywall anywhere in the app.

If you do tip, Apple processes the payment — the app never sees or stores your payment details. Because Apple is the seller of record, refunds are handled by Apple under Apple’s own terms, through the standard “report a problem” flow for App Store purchases in your Apple account’s purchase history. The app also offers a Restore Purchases option if you reinstall or move to a new device.

(The tip is not switched on yet; until it is, that part of the About screen simply shows nothing.)

Pre-release and TestFlight builds

If you are using Uchi through TestFlight, you are using a pre-release build. It is provided for testing: it may contain bugs, features may appear, change, or disappear between builds, and reminders or syncing may not behave as they will at release.

Please don’t put anything in a test household that you can’t afford to lose. Test data may be reset or removed during the testing period, and a TestFlight build stops working when its testing period ends. Feedback is genuinely welcome — write to the address at the bottom of this page.

Availability and changes to the app

Uchi is a small independent app, so please hold realistic expectations: there is no guaranteed uptime, no support contract, and no promise that the app will always be available, uninterrupted, or error-free. It depends on your device, your internet connection, and outside services that are not under my control. Features may be added, changed, or removed as the app develops.

Keep your own copy of anything that really matters to you. If Uchi is ever discontinued, I will say so through the app and on this site rather than letting it go quiet.

Outside services

Your household’s content is kept in a hosted database in the European Union, and a few free public services provide extras: weather (open-meteo.com), optional recipe step ideas (themealdb.com), currency rates for bills (frankfurter.app), and food product information (openfoodfacts.org). Those services have their own terms and are outside my control, and what they return may be unavailable, incomplete, or wrong — treat it as convenience information, not authoritative fact. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is sent to each one.

Open Food Facts, in particular. When somebody searches for a food by name or scans a barcode, Uchi asks Open Food Facts — a free food-product database built and maintained by volunteers, where anyone can add a product or edit one. It is not Uchi’s data and nobody is checking it on your behalf: a figure is only as good as whoever typed the label in, a great many products carry no energy figure at all (Uchi says so in words rather than showing a zero), and the “serving” on a packet is the manufacturer’s idea of a portion, not yours. Whatever comes back is a suggestion for the person to confirm or correct before it goes anywhere near the log. Nothing is sent unless somebody actively searches or scans, and what leaves the phone is only the words typed or the digits of the barcode.

The app itself

You get a personal, non-exclusive licence to use Uchi on Apple devices you own or control, for your own family’s personal, non-commercial use. The app itself — its design, artwork, and code — stays mine, and is licensed to you rather than sold. Please don’t copy, resell, sublicense, or reverse-engineer it, except where the law says you may.

Uchi is distributed through the App Store, so Apple’s own terms for licensed applications apply alongside these terms — the EULA sets out the App Store and Apple-specific terms in full. This agreement is between you and me, not Apple: Apple is not responsible for the app or its content and has no obligation to support it, and Apple and its subsidiaries may enforce these terms as third-party beneficiaries. Where Apple’s required terms and these terms differ, Apple’s terms, and whichever wording is better for you as a consumer, come first.

No warranty

Uchi is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement, to the fullest extent permitted by law. You use Uchi at your own discretion and risk, and you are responsible for backing up anything important to you.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Enes Kırgıl will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, content, savings, or profits, arising out of or related to your use of (or inability to use) Uchi — even if advised of the possibility.

Nothing in these terms takes away rights you have that cannot be waived. In many places, including Türkiye and the European Union, consumers have mandatory legal rights, and liability for things like fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence, cannot be limited. Those rights stand, whatever this document says.

Ending use

You can stop using Uchi whenever you like. Adults can remove members and delete individual items in the app. You can also switch the food log off, unlink Apple Health, and remove the widgets whenever you like without leaving the app at all.

Leaving a household and deleting your account are two different things. Leaving means an adult removes you in the Family tab, which takes your profile and your own content with it. Deleting your account erases the sign-in itself — your address and your password — so that address can never sign in again. A parent removing a child does both at once for that child, because a child’s account is nothing but a device and a PIN.

Neither is a one-tap action inside the app yet. There is no household deletion button, and the Delete my account row in the app hands you a message to send rather than doing it on the spot. Email [email protected] from the address on your account and it will be done by hand — the whole household including its photos, voice notes and documents, or just the account, whichever you ask for. Both in-app versions are being worked on, and these terms will say so when they ship.

Access may be suspended or ended if these terms are seriously or repeatedly broken, or where the law requires it.

Changes to these terms

These terms may be updated as the app develops. When that happens, the “Last updated” date at the top changes, the document’s version stamp changes with it, the new version ships inside the app, and this page is updated too.

A change to these terms or to the License is not something we let you drift past. The adults in a household are asked to read and accept the new version before carrying on, and that acceptance is recorded the same way the first one was. A parent’s acceptance covers the children they set up, and the screen says so rather than doing it quietly — children are never asked to accept anything. A change to the Privacy Policy alone is a notice rather than a new agreement: it appears as one line on your own page in the app, linking to the new text, with a sentence saying what moved.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Türkiye, where the developer is based, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. If you use Uchi as a consumer somewhere else, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer rules of the country you live in.

Contact

Uchi is made by Enes Kırgıl. Questions about these terms, feedback, or a household deletion request: [email protected].