Legal

Terms of Service

Effective September 13, 2026 · Applies to every Android app published by Shura Studios

Kuro: Private Diary Journal Tengu: Bird ID & Sounds Shura Kids Piano

01 Agreement and scope

These Terms of Service are an agreement between you and Shura Studios ("we", "us") covering every Android app we publish: Kuro: Private Diary Journal (com.shura.studios.diary), Tengu: Bird ID & Sounds (com.shura.studios.birds), Shura Kids Piano (com.shura.studios.kids.piano), any app we publish later, and this website. Installing or using an app means you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, uninstall the app.

Our Privacy Policy is part of this agreement. Where a term applies to only one app, that app is named.

Google Play's own terms also apply to anything you download or buy there, and where Google's terms conflict with ours on a matter of distribution, payment or refunds, Google's terms govern that matter.

02 Your licence to use the apps

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use our apps on devices you own or control, for your own non-commercial use. That licence lasts as long as you comply with these terms.

You may not: copy, sell, rent, sublicense or redistribute an app or any part of it; reverse-engineer, decompile or disassemble it except to the extent that applicable law expressly permits despite this restriction; remove or obscure any copyright or attribution notice; bypass, disable or tamper with the licensing, purchase-verification or advertising components; or distribute a modified build, whether or not you charge for it.

03 Eligibility and age

You must be old enough to enter a binding contract where you live, and at least 13 (or the higher minimum age that applies in your country) to use Kuro or Tengu. Those two are general-audience apps and are not directed to children.

Shura Kids Piano is made for children and distributed under Google Play's Families programme. A parent or legal guardian should install it, agrees to these terms on the child's behalf, and is responsible for supervising use and for any purchase made on the device.

04 Acceptable use

Use the apps lawfully and for what they are for. In particular, do not:

• submit content for identification that you have no right to submit, or that is unlawful;
• record people without their consent where the law requires it, or use the recording features to intrude on anyone's privacy;
• disturb, bait, trap or harm wildlife, or play recorded calls in a way that harasses birds — birdwatching carries its own local rules and protected-species laws, and following them is your responsibility;
• trespass, or enter a protected or restricted area, in order to use an app;
• attack, overload, scrape or attempt to gain unauthorised access to any service an app relies on;
• use an app in a way that infringes anyone's intellectual property or other rights.

05 Purchases and subscriptions

How purchases work

Our apps are free to install. Some offer a paid upgrade — a one-time purchase or a subscription — that removes ads and unlocks additional features. Every purchase is processed by Google Play Billing. We never see or handle your payment details. Prices and currency are shown in the app before you confirm, and taxes are handled by Google.

Subscriptions and renewal

A subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period, charged to your Google Play payment method, until you cancel. You cancel in the Google Play app under Subscriptions, or at play.google.com/store/account/subscriptions — not by emailing us, because we have no ability to cancel it for you. Cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends to avoid the next charge; you keep access until the paid period runs out.

Free trials

Where a free trial is offered, it converts into a paid subscription at the end of the trial unless you cancel before it ends. The length of the trial and the price that follows are shown before you start it.

Refunds

Refunds are governed by Google Play's refund policy and are issued by Google, not by us. Google's standard window for an app purchase is short, so decide quickly. If you live somewhere with a statutory right of withdrawal or a consumer guarantee — for example the EU's 14-day right or Australian Consumer Law — that right applies in full and nothing here reduces it. If something we built is broken and you were charged for it, write to us anyway; we will do what we can, including asking Google to support a refund.

Restoring a purchase

Entitlements are tied to the Google Account that bought them. Reinstall the app, sign in with the same account, and the purchase is restored. We cannot move a purchase between accounts.

06 Ads in free versions

Free versions display ads served by Google AdMob. We do not control which specific ads you see and we do not endorse advertisers or what they sell. Advertisers' products and sites are governed by their own terms, and a dispute with an advertiser is between you and them.

Buying the ad-free upgrade removes ads from the app. Details of how ad personalisation and consent work are in §7 of the Privacy Policy.

07 Your content

Your diary entries, photos, recordings, saved birds and everything else you create in our apps remain yours. We claim no ownership of any of it and no licence to use it. It is stored in the app's private storage on your device; we do not run servers that hold it and we cannot read it.

Because your content lives on your device, keeping it safe is on you. Uninstalling an app deletes its data irreversibly. A lost, broken, wiped or stolen phone takes its content with it. Back up anything you would be upset to lose — Kuro's optional Google Drive backup exists for exactly this.

When you submit a photo or recording for identification, you grant only the narrow permission needed to process that request: transmitting the file to the identification service and receiving the result. See §4 of the Privacy Policy.

08 Identification results are estimates

Do not rely on an identification where being wrong would matter: scientific research or published records, legal or regulatory compliance, protected-species reporting, environmental assessment, or any decision about handling a bird. Verify with a field guide, a local ornithological authority or an expert. Species descriptions, range information and reference media shown in the app come from third-party sources and may be incomplete or out of date.

The same applies in kind to everything else our apps produce, including reminders and progress tracking: they are conveniences, not guarantees.

09 Third-party services

Our apps depend on services we do not operate — Google Play, Google AdMob, Firebase, Google Drive, and the bird identification services described in §4 of the Privacy Policy, including BirdNET operated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Those services have their own terms and privacy policies, which apply to your use of them through our apps.

We are not responsible for a third-party service being unavailable, changing, degrading or shutting down. If a service an app depends on disappears, the feature built on it may stop working, and we may have to remove it in a later version.

10 Availability, updates and changes

We provide the apps on an as-available basis. We may release updates that add, change or remove features, and we may discontinue an app or a feature. Where a change is significant, we will say so in the release notes or inside the app.

Keeping a device, an operating system version and a network connection that the app supports is your responsibility, as is any data charge your carrier applies. Google Play may install updates automatically depending on your settings.

If we discontinue a paid feature you are currently subscribed to, we will stop billing for it; for a one-time purchase, the version you already have keeps working on your device for as long as your device runs it.

11 Our intellectual property

The apps, this website, and their source code, design, artwork, themes, illustrations, icons, sounds, text and the "Shura Studios", "Kuro" and "Tengu" names and logos are owned by Shura Studios or our licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark and other laws. Nothing in these terms transfers any of that to you beyond the licence in §2.

Third-party content used under licence — including species imagery and audio from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's collections — remains the property of its owners and is subject to their terms.

12 Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the apps are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement. We do not warrant that an app will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or that its results will be accurate or meet your expectations.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties or consumer guarantees. Where that is the case, this section applies only as far as that law allows, and your statutory rights are unaffected.

13 Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Shura Studios is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data or lost content, arising out of or relating to your use of the apps — including data loss from an uninstall, a device failure, a failed or corrupted backup, or reliance on an identification result.

Our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to an app is limited to the greater of the amount you actually paid us for that app in the twelve months before the claim, or ten US dollars (USD 10).

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. If you are a consumer, your mandatory statutory rights are unaffected by this section.

14 Termination

You may end this agreement at any time by uninstalling the apps. We may suspend or end your licence if you materially breach these terms, in particular §2 or §4. On termination the licence in §2 ends and you must stop using and delete the apps. Sections 7, 8 and 11 to 15 survive termination.

15 Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the courts of Vietnam have jurisdiction over any dispute.

If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer-law provisions of your country of residence, and you may also bring proceedings in the courts there.

Before starting formal proceedings, please write to shurastudios@gmail.com. Most problems are a bug, and most bugs are faster to fix than to litigate.

16 Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The effective date at the top of the page changes, and the current version always lives at this URL. For a material change we will give notice inside the affected app before it takes effect. Continuing to use an app after that means you accept the updated terms; if you do not, uninstall it.

If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest stays in force and that provision is applied as far as it lawfully can be. These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us about the apps.

17 Contact

Shura Studios — shurastudios@gmail.com. Tell us which app you are writing about and we will get to you faster.