Terms of use

Plain-language summary, which is not the terms: Yapmesh is free software that runs on your phone. There is no account and no service, so there is nothing to sign up for and nothing we can switch off. You must be 18 or over. Use it lawfully and decently; the community standards say what that means. It comes with no warranty. If you turn on internet reach, link previews, a spool or a LoRa board, you are using other people's infrastructure under their rules and at your own cost.

1. What these terms cover

These terms are between you and Zafar Ali Khan, the maker of Yapmesh ("we", "us"), and cover the Yapmesh app for Android in both editions, the laptop browser client, and the website yapmesh.com. By installing or using any of them you agree to these terms, the privacy policy and the community standards. If you do not agree, do not use Yapmesh.

2. Who may use Yapmesh

You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live if that is higher. Yapmesh has no moderation, no way to remove content from anyone else's phone and no way to verify who anyone is, which is why it is not for children. A school, employer or organisation that puts Yapmesh on devices it controls is responsible for the people it gives them to.

3. What Yapmesh is, and is not

Yapmesh is software that runs on your phone and talks to other phones directly. There is no Yapmesh service, no account, no server of ours and nothing to subscribe to, so there is nothing we can suspend, terminate, recover or restore. Your identity is a key made on your phone; if the phone is lost, so is the key, and we cannot give it back.

4. Your licence to use the app

We grant you a personal, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use Yapmesh on devices you own or control, and to hand a copy of the yapmesh.com edition to another person exactly as the app does it. The source repository at github.com/zakonweb/yapmesh does not yet carry an open-source licence; until one is added, all other rights are reserved, and the code is published for reading, review and security testing. The protocol specification and the core library are intended to be released under an open-source licence, and that will replace this paragraph when it happens. Third-party components inside the app remain under their own licences, listed on the open-source notices page.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to use Yapmesh to do, or to help anyone do, anything listed in the community standards, and in particular not to:

• threaten, harass, stalk, defraud, impersonate or endanger anyone;
• create, request, send or store any sexual content involving a child, or approach a child for a sexual purpose (see the child safety standards);
• send anything unlawful where you or the recipient are, including material you have no right to share;
• send files designed to damage a phone, flood the mesh, fill other phones' storage, or forge, replay or alter frames;
• interfere with other people's phones, radios or relays, or test Yapmesh against phones that are not yours without permission;
• remove or alter the app's signature, or distribute a modified build under the Yapmesh name.

Nobody can ban you from a serverless network. What happens if you break these rules is what the people around you can do: block you on their phones, vote to shun you as a mesh, keep and export a report, and hand it to the authorities. We will help them do that.

6. Your content

Everything you send is yours. Because we never receive it, you grant us no licence to it. You are responsible for it and for having the right to share it. Your phone also carries sealed frames for other people, as theirs carry yours: you cannot read those, you are not responsible for their content, and you may stop carrying them by closing the app. Files you put in the Nearby drop zone go to everyone in range, and Nearby-room messages are readable by everyone in range, by design.

7. Third-party services, hardware and costs

Some features use infrastructure that is not ours, only when you switch them on, and each has its own terms and its own view of your traffic, set out in the privacy policy:

• Internet reach uses public Nostr relays, MQTT brokers and STUN servers run by other people. They may rate-limit, block, go away or change their rules at any time. You may replace every host in the settings.
• A spool is a mailbox relay you typed in, run by you or by someone you trust. We run none.
• Push wake uses a UnifiedPush distributor you installed.
• Link previews fetch the linked page from its own site.
• A LoRa board is hardware you own, on a radio channel shared with every other board; radio rules where you are apply to you.
• SMS is sent through your own messaging app and carrier; carrier charges are yours.
• Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct links are made by Google Play Services on phones that have it.

Mobile data, SMS charges, battery and storage used by Yapmesh are yours. Yapmesh is free and has no purchases, subscriptions or advertising.

8. The two editions, and installing from outside a store

The Google Play edition follows Google Play's rules: it does not read SMS and does not install or hand out its own APK. The yapmesh.com edition does both. Everything else is identical. If you install from this site, from GitHub or from another phone, install only a build whose signing-key fingerprint matches the one published on the security page and shown on the giving phone. We take no responsibility for modified copies, and the app refuses to update itself from a differently signed build.

9. Not a substitute for emergency services

The SOS feature reaches phones running Yapmesh within radio range or carried by people who walk. It does not call the police, an ambulance or a rescue service, and it can fail silently when no phone is in reach. Use the emergency number of your country whenever you can.

10. Safety features have limits

Blocking stops delivery to your phone; it does not stop your phone relaying sealed frames for others. The abuse filter is a word list on your phone, not a judgement. File safety asks before fetching and before opening dangerous kinds of file; it does not scan for viruses, because nothing between two phones can look inside. "Delete for everyone" is a request that phones obeying the protocol honour. Fences and retention remove data from phones that follow the rules; they cannot stop a screenshot. The security page lists what is and is not protected.

11. Intellectual property and trademarks

"Yapmesh" and the Yapmesh mark are names and designs used by this project; use them only to describe Yapmesh, following the brand sheet, and do not use them for a modified build or a different product. Other names on this site belong to their owners and are used only to describe their products. Google Play, Android, Nostr, MQTT, Meshtastic, Signal and WhatsApp are marks of their respective owners; Yapmesh is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.

12. Copyright complaints

We host no user content and cannot remove anything from anyone's phone. If something on yapmesh.com infringes your rights, email [email protected] with "Copyright:" in the subject, the work, the page, and your contact details, and we will act within seven days.

13. Feedback and security reports

If you send us ideas, bug reports or security findings, we may use them without obligation to you; we will credit you if you want. Security testing against your own phones is welcome under the responsible disclosure terms, which are the safe harbour for it.

14. No warranty

Yapmesh is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and that it will be secure, uninterrupted or error-free. It is a work in progress: the home page marks each feature as verified on real phones or as built and not yet field-tested, and the security page says what has not been audited. Nothing on this site is a promise of availability.

15. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or any loss of data, messages, business or goodwill, arising from the use of or inability to use Yapmesh, from anything sent through it by anyone, from any third-party relay, distributor, board or carrier, or from the failure of an SOS to reach help. Our total liability for anything else is limited to the amount you paid for Yapmesh, which is nothing. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or your statutory consumer rights where you live.

16. Your responsibility to others

If your breach of these terms or of the law causes a claim against us, you will cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it.

17. Export control and sanctions

Yapmesh contains publicly available, open-source encryption (Ed25519, X25519, ChaCha20-Poly1305) and is distributed from Pakistan. You are responsible for the law where you are: some jurisdictions restrict encryption software, radio use, mesh networking or LoRa channels. Do not use Yapmesh where it is prohibited, and do not use it to evade sanctions.

For Zak's check before publishing: the author believes no export licence is required for this distribution; this statement has not been reviewed by a lawyer.

18. Ending things

You end these terms by deleting the app. We may stop distributing Yapmesh, or a particular edition, at any time; copies already installed keep working, because they do not depend on us. If you break these terms, our only remedy against you is to stop distributing to you, which we cannot enforce on a serverless network, and to help the people you harmed.

19. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of Pakistan, where the project is made, without prejudice to consumer rights you have where you live. The courts of Pakistan have jurisdiction, except that a consumer in the European Union or the United Kingdom may bring a claim in their own country. Before any claim, write to us; most things can be settled by email.

20. Changes, severability, the whole agreement

These terms are versioned in the public repository; the effective date above is the date of the last change, and material changes are named in the app's release notes. If a court finds a part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stands. These terms, the privacy policy and the community standards are the whole agreement between you and us about Yapmesh.

Contact

Zafar Ali Khan, Yapmesh, Pakistan. [email protected].