QuizuncleBeacon

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Terms of Use

Effective

These are the terms for using Beacon. “We” means Quizuncle, the indie studio behind Beacon; “you” means whoever is using the app. They are short on purpose, and everything in them is something we actually intend to hold to.

Acceptance

By downloading, installing or using Beacon, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the app.

License to use

Beacon is free of charge. We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to install and use it on machines you control, for personal work and commercial work alike. You do not need an account, and you do not need to tell us who you are.

Free today. A pro tier is planned; nothing that is free now will be moved behind it.

That sentence is a commitment, not marketing copy. If a paid tier ever arrives, it will be made of things that do not exist yet — not of features you are already using.

What this license is not

The license above covers using the app. It does not cover anything else. Specifically:

  • Beacon’s source code is private and is not licensed to you. This is not open-source software.
  • You may not redistribute the app, or distribute modified builds of it.
  • You may not reverse-engineer, decompile or disassemble the app, except to the extent that the law gives you that right regardless of what this clause says.
  • You may not remove or alter copyright, license or attribution notices in the app.

No warranty

BEACON IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE APP WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE, OR THAT ANY DEFECT WILL BE CORRECTED.

One part of that deserves saying in normal words rather than capitals, because it affects what macOS does when you first open the app.

Beacon is not code-signed or notarized by Apple. Signing and notarization require a paid Apple Developer subscription, which this indie project does not have. The install script and Homebrew both clear the macOS quarantine flag for you automatically. If you installed the DMG by hand instead, you run this once:

xattr -cr /Applications/Beacon.app

That command recursively clears the extended attributes on the app bundle — including the quarantine flag, which is the one standing in your way. Its effect stops at /Applications/Beacon.app: it does not disable Gatekeeper, System Integrity Protection, or any other macOS security protection. It is still worth being deliberate about it. You are choosing to run a binary that Apple has not checked, on our word that it is what we say it is.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, nor for lost data, lost profits or business interruption, arising out of or connected with your use of Beacon. Our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the amount you paid for the app, which is nothing.

Your data is your responsibility

Beacon keeps your data on your machine by design, and that design hands you the responsibility along with the control:

  • We keep no hosted backups of your work. Cloud Sync is a synchronisation mechanism, not a backup service. Keep your own backups of anything you cannot afford to lose.
  • A forgotten sync passphrase cannot be recovered. It never leaves your device, so we do not have it and cannot reset it for you. The only route forward is to reset and re-encrypt.
  • A published share is public. It is world-readable and unencrypted, and anyone with the link can read it. Beacon strips the secrets it can identify before publishing, but it cannot find a credential hardcoded into a URL, a header value or a body. Check what you are publishing, and revoke the share when you are done with it.

Third-party services under their own terms

Firebase Authentication and Cloud Firestore (Google), GitHub, and Homebrew each have their own terms of service and privacy policies. When you sign in, sync, publish a share, check for an update or install through Homebrew, you are using those services on their terms as well as ours. We do not control them and are not responsible for them. What data reaches each of them is set out in our privacy policy.

Cloud services are best-effort

The optional account, Cloud Sync and public sharing are offered on a best-effort basis. There is no service level agreement, no uptime guarantee, and no promise that any of them will exist forever. We may change them, limit them, or withdraw them. Where we reasonably can, we will give notice of a withdrawal ahead of time rather than switching it off without warning.

The app itself keeps working offline and locally either way. Everything you have made is still in the database on your Mac — that is the point of storing it there. If you had Cloud Sync switched on, the second copy in our Firestore project is the one a withdrawal would take away; the local database is not touched by it.

Termination

You can stop using Beacon whenever you like: uninstall it, and, if you made an account, ask us to delete it by emailing support@quizuncle.com from the address you signed up with. There is no button for deleting the account in the app yet — disabling Cloud Sync deletes your synced documents, not the sign-in record. Our privacy policy sets out how to remove your data.

We may suspend or end cloud access for an account being used to break these terms or the law. Ending cloud access does not remove the app from your machine, and does not touch the data stored on it.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts of India have jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of Beacon.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to support@quizuncle.com.

Effective . See also the privacy policy.