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 the developer of Hatch, reachable at the support address in the app. It is not an agreement with Apple or Google, whatever 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.
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 copy of your data.
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. 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, on a device we cannot reach.
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 or the device it runs on: no tampering with the build, no repackaging it under another name, no distributing a modified copy as if it were ours.
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: an app cannot remove its own icon on iOS, 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 iCloud and Google backups, so a new phone restored from one will not contain it. Use the app's own encrypted export, keep the file somewhere you trust, and check now and then that you can actually open it.
A backup nobody has ever restored is a rumour. The only copies of your data that will exist are the ones you make.
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.
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; and where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to what you paid for the app in the twelve months before the claim, which for most people is nothing.
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
If the app offers purchases, they are handled by the App Store or Google Play under their terms. Refunds go through the store.
A subscription, if one exists, renews until you cancel it, and you cancel it in the store's own account settings rather than in the app. We never see your card details.
The stores you installed from
Apple and 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.
Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms for the iOS version and may enforce them against you. 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. Nothing is left running, and nothing is left with us, because nothing was ever with us.
We may end them if you break them in a way that matters — though in practice this means little: there is no account for us to close and no remote switch for us to throw. 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 the support address in Settings → Help & support.