Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of these Terms

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your use of Game of Chores (the “Service”), provided by Umut Aktaş (“we,” “us”), a natural person based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The Service is distributed through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, accessed through our website at gameofchores.me, and includes features such as households, chores, weekly cycles, streaks, share cards, and invite links or invite codes.

By creating an Account or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not create an Account and do not use the Service. If you are using the Service on behalf of someone else, you confirm you have authority to bind that person to these Terms.

These Terms are presented alongside our Privacy Policy, available at gameofchores.me/privacy, which describes how we process your personal data. Where these Terms refer to the “Privacy Policy” they refer to that document as updated from time to time. In the event of a conflict between these Terms and the Privacy Policy on a matter of personal-data processing, the Privacy Policy governs.

2. Definitions

For these Terms:

• “Service” means the Game of Chores mobile application, the website at gameofchores.me, and any features delivered through them, including households, chores, weekly cycles, streaks, share cards, and invite links or invite codes.
• “Account” means your individual user account in the Service, created via Sign in with Apple or Sign in with Google.
• “User Content” means anything you submit, upload, or otherwise make available through the Service — including chore titles and how-to steps, proof and target photos, prize text, display names, avatars, and household names.
• “We,” “us,” “our” refers to Umut Aktaş, the operator of the Service. The Service is distributed under developer accounts registered in Turkey; the contracting party under these Terms is Umut Aktaş personally, and the store accounts are distribution channels only.

3. Eligibility

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. Users under 13 cannot create an Account.

Adults creating their own account. Game of Chores 2.0 and later do not ask for, collect, or store a date of birth. Our earlier release, version 1.x — which some people still have installed — asks for a birth month and year to run its own age check, and stores that value on the account. If your account has been used with version 1.x, it currently holds a birth month and year. We use it for nothing else and we never share it. We are retiring version 1.x, and we will delete all remaining birth month and year values within 30 days of that retirement completing. You can ask us to delete yours sooner at privacy@gameofchores.me.

During setup in 2.0 the account holder is asked once to state their age band. The answer is not stored, not transmitted to us, and not used to configure anything. Choosing the under-13 option ends setup and returns you to the welcome screen. The App shows no ads to anyone.

If we discover that an Account belongs to a user under 13, we will close it and delete the data associated with it as described in Section 9 of the Privacy Policy.

4. Your Account

To use the Service you must create an Account by signing in with Apple or Google. By doing so, you authorize the Service to receive from Apple or Google the limited identity information described in Section 2.1 of the Privacy Policy.

You may hold one Account at a time. Creating additional Accounts to circumvent a Report-driven restriction or any other consequence imposed under these Terms is a breach of these Terms. We may merge, suspend, or close additional Accounts at our discretion.

You are responsible for keeping your Apple ID or Google account credentials secure. We rely on the identity provider’s authentication; we do not store passwords. If you suspect unauthorized access to your Account, sign out from all devices through your Apple or Google account settings and contact us at support@gameofchores.me.

You choose a display name and may upload an avatar. Display names and avatars are User Content and are subject to the Acceptable Use rules in Section 7. We may require you to change a display name or avatar that impersonates another person, infringes a trademark or publicity right, contains hate speech or sexual content, or is otherwise inconsistent with Section 7.

Your Account is personal and non-transferable. You may not sell, lease, share, or otherwise transfer your Account or any associated state (points, weekly totals, streaks, household membership) to any other person.

5. The Service

The Service operates on a free-of-charge basis. There are no paid features, in-app purchases, subscriptions, or advertisements in the current version of the Service. If we introduce any of these in a future version, we will give advance notice through the change-notification mechanism in Section 14, and these Terms will be amended to govern them; we will not introduce paid features retroactively against existing Accounts without your acceptance of the amended Terms.

The Service is provided to you “as is” and “as available,” subject to the warranties and consumer-protection rights described in Section 12. We may add, modify, or remove features at any time. We may release updates from time to time; some updates may be required for continued use of the Service. The Service requires an active internet connection and a compatible Apple or Android device; performance depends on the device, the operating system, and network conditions outside our control.

Where the Service offers a feature labelled as “beta” or “experimental” in the user interface or in release notes, that feature is provided on an experimental basis. We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness, or continued availability of beta features, and we may end a beta at any time without notice.

The Service does not promise that your household members will remain active users of it. We do not control whether someone you have invited will continue to use the Service, and we are not responsible if a person on whom your household experience depends stops using the Service.

6. Your Content

6.1 You keep ownership of your User Content

You own your User Content. These Terms do not transfer ownership of your User Content to us or to other users.

6.2 The license you grant to us

To operate the Service, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub-licensable (only to the sub-processors listed in Section 4 of the Privacy Policy and only for the purposes described there), and transferable (only to a successor entity per Section 14) license to host, store, cache, transmit, display, reformat, resize, transcode, derive thumbnails from, strip metadata from, and otherwise process your User Content solely to operate the Service.

This license ends when you delete your Account, with three carve-outs that match the retention rules in Section 6 of the Privacy Policy: (a) anonymized references to your past User Content may remain in other users’ app state in the form described there — for example, household board entries or weekly result history with your display name replaced by “Deleted User”; (b) routine system backups may retain your User Content for a limited period before being overwritten; and (c) records we are required to retain by law, or that we reasonably need to retain to resolve a dispute or enforce these Terms, may be retained for as long as necessary for that purpose.

6.3 The license you grant to other users

You grant other users of the Service a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to view, access, and screenshot your User Content as the Service makes it visible to them — including User Content displayed on the household board, in the weekly result, and on share cards you generate for them. This license is narrow and operational; it does not give other users the right to commercialize your User Content, use it in a way that infringes your rights or applicable law, or continue using it after you have deleted the underlying User Content from the Service, except where they have already exercised the screenshot or share-card mechanisms the Service provides.

6.4 Your responsibilities for User Content

You are responsible for your User Content. You warrant that:

• you own your User Content or have all rights necessary to grant the licenses set out above;
• your User Content does not infringe the intellectual-property, privacy, publicity, moral, or other rights of any third party;
• your User Content does not include personal data of other people that you do not have a lawful basis to submit — for example, a recognizable photo of another person who has not agreed to appear in your proof photo;
• your User Content complies with the Acceptable Use rules in Section 7.

Content you export as a share card and publish to social channels outside the Service may be seen by other users of the Service and by people outside it. Do not include anything in a share card that you would not want to be public.

You are responsible for keeping your own copies of any User Content that matters to you. The Service is not a long-term archive.

6.5 Removal of User Content

We may remove User Content that we reasonably believe violates these Terms, infringes the rights of a third party, creates a safety risk, or is the subject of a valid legal request. We will give you notice of the removal where reasonably possible and where doing so does not undermine the purpose of the removal (for example, where notice would compromise a safety investigation).

You may delete your own User Content through the standard mechanisms in the Service — for example, deleting a chore, deleting prize text where supported, or (for bulk deletion) deleting your Account through Settings → Delete Account. Removal of User Content from the Service does not always result in immediate erasure from every system; the retention and erasure rules in Section 6 of the Privacy Policy apply.

7. Acceptable Use

You agree not to use the Service to:

1. Spam — send repeated unwanted invites or other content; create automated or scripted Accounts; mass-create chores, or log chores as done that were not actually done, to manipulate points, streaks, or weekly totals.
2. Harass — bully, threaten, intimidate, stalk, or repeatedly contact another user against their expressed wishes, including by using chore titles or prize text to do so.
3. Promote hatred — submit User Content that incites violence against, dehumanizes, or expresses hatred toward a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or any other protected characteristic.
4. Submit sexual content — submit proof photos, share cards, display names, avatars, chore titles, or prize text that are pornographic, sexually explicit, or sexually suggestive. The Service is not a platform for sexual content of any kind.
5. Endanger children — submit content that sexualizes minors in any form, attempt to contact minors for sexual purposes, or use the Service to facilitate harm to minors. We cooperate with child-safety authorities and will act on credible reports without warning.
6. Promote self-harm — submit content that encourages suicide, self-injury, eating disorders, or other forms of self-harm. If you are struggling, the Service is not a place for help; please reach out to a local crisis line.
7. Infringe intellectual-property rights — submit User Content that copies, reproduces, or distributes work in which you do not own the rights or have the necessary permissions; use the Service’s branding, logos, screenshots, or share-card templates in a way that suggests endorsement or affiliation you do not have.
8. Violate other policy or law — use the Service to commit fraud, distribute malware, breach another person’s privacy, evade lawful taxes, engage in regulated gambling (the Service’s manager-set prizes are free-text descriptions with no money or monetary value involved, not gambling), or otherwise do something that breaks the law in your jurisdiction or in ours.

We retain final discretion on edge cases not specifically listed above. Where the line between acceptable and unacceptable is unclear, we will decide in good faith with the safety of the community and the integrity of the Service as the guiding criteria.

Consequences. Depending on the severity and pattern of a breach, we may warn you, remove the offending User Content, restrict or remove specific features (for example, disable your ability to set prize text), restrict your interactions with other users (for example, by enforcing a one-way mute), or suspend or close your Account. For breaches involving child-safety risk, credible threats of violence, or sustained harassment, we may close the Account without prior warning.

8. How-to steps

A chore can carry a how-to step list. In Manager mode, the household manager can add steps to a custom chore — either by taking them from the bundled on-device suggestion catalogue that ships with the app, or by typing them directly. The matching happens on your device. Nothing you type and no photo you take is sent to any AI provider, and the Service does not generate steps for you.

Earlier versions of the app used AI services to generate suggestions and how-to steps; version 2.0 and later do not. Section 6 of the Privacy Policy explains what remains stored from those earlier versions.

How-to steps are advisory. They may be incomplete, inaccurate, or unfit for your specific situation, and nothing in them is professional advice of any kind (medical, legal, safety, household-chemical-handling, or otherwise). You decide which steps to save, and you are responsible for how the chore is carried out.

No automated system reviews, verifies, or reaches a verdict on a proof photo or on any chore you log as done. Verification of a done stays with the household owner.

9. Report and remove

The Service provides tools to report content or behavior that violates Section 7, and — within a household — for the household owner to remove a member. The mechanics, data we record, and consequences are described in Section 2.11 of the Privacy Policy.

If you submit a Report in good faith, we will not penalize you for doing so, even if we ultimately conclude that no breach occurred. If you submit Reports in bad faith — for example, mass-reporting a household member to harass them, or using the Report tool to gain an advantage over another household member — we may treat the bad-faith Reports themselves as a breach of Section 7 and apply consequences accordingly.

Reports are visible only to the operator; the reported user is not notified that you submitted the Report.

10. Termination, statement of reasons, and appeals

10.1 By you

You may stop using the Service at any time. To delete your Account, use Settings → Delete Account; the deletion flow requires three steps including typing the phrase “delete my account,” and there is no grace period. Account deletion triggers the data-purge process described in Section 6 of the Privacy Policy.

10.2 By us — for cause

We may suspend or close your Account, with or without prior notice depending on the severity of the breach, where:

• you breach these Terms — in particular Section 7 (Acceptable Use), Section 4 (Account integrity, including multi-Account circumvention), or Section 6 (User Content warranties);
• we are required to do so by law, court order, or a competent authority’s instruction; or
• continued operation of your Account would create a safety risk for other users or for the Service.

For child-safety breaches, credible threats of violence, sustained harassment, and similarly severe breaches, suspension or closure is generally immediate and without prior warning.

10.3 By us — without cause

We may close your Account without cause on at least thirty days’ written notice (sent to the email address associated with your Account). This option exists because the Service is offered free of charge and a perpetual right to use it would not reflect the parties’ commercial relationship. We will not exercise it as a workaround for a for-cause termination process you are entitled to under mandatory consumer-protection law.

10.4 Statement of reasons

When we take action against your User Content or your Account under these Terms — including removing User Content, restricting your access to specific features, suspending your Account, or closing your Account — we will give you a clear and specific statement of reasons. The statement will include the action we have taken; the User Content, behavior, or other circumstances concerned; the rule of these Terms or legal ground we relied on; the principal facts and considerations on which we based the decision; whether automated means were used in reaching the decision and to what extent; the territorial scope and duration of the action; and the redress options available to you under Section 10.5 and applicable law. We will provide the statement of reasons through the Service or by email to the address associated with your Account, except where doing so would compromise an active safety investigation or where we are prohibited by law from disclosing it.

10.5 Appeals

If you believe we have made a moderation decision in error, you may appeal it by emailing legal@gameofchores.me within thirty days of receiving the statement of reasons. Your appeal should identify the action you are challenging, the User Content or behavior concerned, and the reasons you believe the decision should be reversed. We will review the appeal and respond with our final decision within fifteen working days of receiving it, except for appeals of decisions that we treat as low-risk under these Terms, where the in-Service mechanism is the appropriate channel and a separate email appeal is not necessary.

This appeals procedure is in addition to, and does not replace, your rights under applicable law, including (a) your right to bring a dispute before the competent courts under Section 14.4 and the closing paragraph of these Terms; (b) your right, if you are a user in the European Union, to use an out-of-court dispute settlement body certified by your Member State under Article 21 of the Digital Services Act; and (c) any rights you may have to lodge a complaint with a supervisory or consumer-protection authority in your country of residence.

10.6 What happens on termination

On termination of your Account, the licenses you granted to us under Section 6.2 end with the carve-outs described there. The licenses you granted to other users under Section 6.3 end except where they have already exercised the screenshot or share-card mechanisms the Service provides. Sections 6.4, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15, and any other provision that by its nature should survive termination, will survive.

11. Apple App Store and Google Play

When you download the Service from the Apple App Store, your use of the Service is also governed by Apple’s Licensed Application End User License Agreement, available at apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula. When you download the Service from Google Play, your use of the Service is also governed by the terms applicable to apps obtained through Google Play, including Google Play’s Terms of Service.

You acknowledge that these Terms are concluded between you and us, and not between you and Apple Inc. or Google LLC. We — not Apple or Google — are solely responsible for the Service and its content. To the extent these Terms grant you a license to use the Service, that license is non-transferable and is limited to use on a device that you own or control and as permitted by the usage rules in the relevant store agreement.

Apple and Google have no obligation to provide maintenance or support for the Service; that obligation is ours, exercised as described in these Terms. Apple and Google are not warrantors of the Service; any failure of the Service to conform to any warranty may be reported to Apple under its standard refund process for iOS users, or to Google under its standard refund process for Android users. Apple and Google have no responsibility for product claims, intellectual-property claims, or any other claim relating to the Service. You agree to comply with all applicable third-party terms in your use of the Service, including the usage rules in the Apple App Store EULA and the Google Play Terms.

You confirm that (i) you are not located in a country that is subject to a United States Government embargo or that has been designated by the United States Government as a “terrorist-supporting” country and (ii) you are not on any United States Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

Apple Inc. and Google LLC are third-party beneficiaries of this Section 11, and each may enforce its provisions against you.

12. Disclaimers

To the extent permitted by law, and except as expressly stated in these Terms or required by mandatory consumer-protection law in your country of residence, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory. This includes any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, completeness, and uninterrupted or error-free operation.

In particular:

• How-to steps. We do not warrant that suggested how-to steps are accurate, complete, or fit for any particular purpose. They are advisory only; see Section 8.
• Identity providers. We do not warrant the availability, accuracy, or security of Sign in with Apple or Sign in with Google. If an identity provider experiences an outage or terminates your access to your underlying Apple ID or Google account, you may temporarily or permanently lose access to your Service Account, and we have no obligation to restore it through alternative means.
• Competitive fairness. We provide weekly totals and household features on a best-effort basis. We enforce the Acceptable Use rules in Section 7 to keep these features fair, but we do not warrant that every outcome is “fair” in any subjective sense or that we will detect every breach.
• Third-party services. We do not warrant the continued availability or behavior of any third-party service the Service depends on (Apple and Google identity, Apple and Google Play stores, push-notification infrastructure, and others described in Section 4 of the Privacy Policy).

Nothing in this Section 12 limits or excludes liability that cannot be limited or excluded under mandatory law in your country of residence, including (where applicable) the consumer-protection rights under the European Union Consumer Rights Directive (2011/83/EU), the Unfair Contract Terms Directive (93/13/EEC), and the Sale of Consumer Goods Directive (2019/771/EU). If you are a consumer resident in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, your statutory consumer rights are not affected by anything in this Section.

13. Limitation of liability

To the extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability to you under or in connection with these Terms or your use of the Service is limited to the greatest of:

(a) one hundred euros (€100);

(b) the total amount you have paid to us, if any, for the Service in the twelve months immediately preceding the event giving rise to the claim — which, at the current version of the Service, is zero;

(c) the minimum amount required by mandatory consumer-protection law in your country of residence.

We are not liable to you, to the extent permitted by law, for: indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages; loss of profits, revenue, business opportunity, or goodwill; loss of data (including User Content you did not back up); damages arising from your reliance on any content generated by or visible through the Service; or damages arising from another user’s conduct, content, or termination of use.

These limitations do not apply to: (i) liability for gross negligence or willful misconduct; (ii) liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, which cannot be excluded under mandatory consumer-protection law in the European Union; (iii) liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or (iv) any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded under mandatory law in your country of residence.

If we introduce paid features in a future version of the Service, this Section 13 will be revisited as part of the amended Terms accompanying that change.

14. Indemnification, Changes, and Dispute Resolution

14.1 Your indemnity

To the extent permitted by law, you will indemnify, defend (at our option), and hold harmless Umut Aktaş from and against any third-party claim, demand, loss, damage, cost, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from (a) your breach of these Terms, (b) User Content you submitted that infringed the rights of the third party making the claim, or (c) your misuse of the Service. We will give you reasonable notice of any claim subject to this indemnity and reasonable cooperation in defending it, and you will not settle any claim that imposes any obligation on us without our prior written consent.

This Section 14.1 does not apply to consumers in jurisdictions where indemnification by a consumer of a service operator is unenforceable or where consumer-protection law restricts it.

14.2 Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes — for example, the introduction of paid features, a change of governing law, a significant change to the licenses you grant under Section 6, or any other change that materially affects your rights or obligations — are published here with a future effective date and described in the App’s store release notes for the release in which they take effect, mirroring the change-notification mechanism in Section 11 of the Privacy Policy.

If you object to a material change before it takes effect, your remedy is to stop using the Service and delete your Account through Settings → Delete Account; continued use of the Service after the change takes effect constitutes your acceptance of the updated Terms.

Minor changes — typographical corrections, clarifications, formatting changes that do not affect the substance of your rights and obligations — update the “Last updated” date only.

14.3 Assignment

You may not assign your rights or obligations under these Terms. We may assign these Terms in connection with a sale, merger, reorganization, or similar transaction, provided that the assignee agrees in writing to be bound by these Terms; we will notify you of any such assignment through the change-notification mechanism above.

14.4 Dispute resolution

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Netherlands. Any dispute between you and us arising from or in connection with these Terms or your use of the Service will be brought before the competent courts of Utrecht, the Netherlands.

This jurisdiction clause does not deprive you of (a) the protection of mandatory provisions of Turkish law if you are resident in Turkey, or (b) the protection of mandatory consumer-protection law in your country of residence that grants you the right to bring proceedings in your local courts. There is no mandatory arbitration clause in these Terms, and there is no waiver of any right you may have under EU consumer law to participate in collective proceedings — to the extent any such waiver appeared in these Terms, it would be unenforceable under Dutch and EU consumer law and we do not attempt to impose one.

15. General

Additional information for users in Turkey (KVKK). If you are located in Turkey, the Personal Data Protection Law (Kişisel Verilerin Korunması Kanunu, Law No. 6698) applies to our processing of your personal data, in addition to GDPR. The transparency disclosures required by KVKK Article 10 are set out in Section 13 of the Privacy Policy; they apply equally to these Terms.

Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any feature-specific terms we may publish from time to time, constitute the entire agreement between you and us in relation to the Service. They supersede any prior agreement, understanding, or representation on the same subject matter.

Severability. If any provision of these Terms is found to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in force. Where a provision is found invalid only in part, the invalid part is severed and the remainder of the provision continues to apply. Where mandatory consumer-protection law in your country of residence requires it, the provision is read as modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable rather than struck out.

No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision of these Terms on a particular occasion, that is not a waiver of our right to enforce it on a later occasion.

Notices. We will give you any notice required under these Terms by publishing it here with a “Last updated” date, by email to the address associated with your Account, or by describing it in the App’s store release notes, in each case as described in the relevant Section. You may give us notice at legal@gameofchores.me.

Contact. For general questions about these Terms: contact@gameofchores.me. For legal notices: legal@gameofchores.me. For privacy questions: privacy@gameofchores.me.