Terms of Use

Clause 01

The arrangement

These terms sit between you and Alexa Pan, the publisher of Perch. They take effect when you install the app, and they also cover this website. If some part of them does not suit you, the remedy is simple and free: do not install Perch, or remove it.

Apple's own App Store terms apply on top of these, and where the two disagree about something Apple governs — delivery, refunds, your Apple Account — Apple's version wins.

Clause 02

What Perch is

Perch makes an iPhone behave like the plastic remote for a compatible television or streaming player sharing your home Wi‑Fi. It presses keys, moves around menus, adjusts volume, sends typed text to a field the television has open, opens the apps already installed on that television, and puts the same handful of buttons on your Home Screen, your Lock Screen, in Control Center and behind a few Siri phrases.

Perch is a client, not a service. There is no account to create, no server of ours in the path, and nothing to sign in to. Demo Mode is included so that every screen can be seen without hardware present; while it is on, the app opens no network connection at all and labels each screen it touches.

Clause 03

Price, and the absence of one

The app is offered at no cost. It contains no in-app purchases, no subscription, no trial that later charges, no advertising and no paid tier held back behind a button. Nothing in Perch is unlocked by watching, sharing or handing over information.

Should that ever change in a future version, the price and terms of any paid element would be shown to you inside the app before you could agree to anything, and Apple would handle the payment. Nothing you have today would become paid retroactively.

Clause 04

Your licence

You get a personal, revocable, non-transferable permission to run Perch on iPhones that are yours or otherwise under your control, for as long as you keep it installed. The app itself, its name, its icon and its artwork remain ours.

What that permission does not include: selling or renting the app on, presenting it as part of another product, taking it apart to rebuild it elsewhere, or stripping the marks off it — except where your own national law grants you those rights whatever a licence says, in which case the law applies.

Clause 05

Fair use of the app

• Point Perch at hardware that belongs to you, or that its owner has agreed you may operate. Controlling a neighbour's television through a shared or badly configured network is not a feature, and it is on you if you try.
• Use it on networks you are entitled to be on. Some workplaces, hotels and campuses forbid device discovery on their networks; their rules are theirs to set.
• Never aim it at equipment in order to disrupt that equipment, or to bother the people using it.
• Do not rely on it where a failed key press would matter — see clause 07.

Clause 06

Independence and trademarks

Clause 07

What is promised, and what is not

Perch talks to equipment that somebody else designed, over a network that somebody else configured, using an interface that the manufacturer can narrow or retire in a firmware update without telling anyone. We test what we can reach; we cannot test every model, every firmware and every router.

So Perch is supplied in the state it is actually in, and we make no guarantee, spoken or implied, that it will find your device, that every key will do what its label says on your particular model, that it will keep working after your television updates itself, or that it will run without interruption or defect. In particular we do not promise merchantable quality or suitability for any purpose you have in mind, to the degree that such promises can be excluded where you live.

What we do undertake: to answer support mail from a human being, to be straight about what is broken, and to say plainly when something is outside our reach.

Clause 08

Where the risk sits

As far as your local law allows, we are not answerable for indirect or knock-on loss arising from Perch — a missed programme, a meeting that ran on because the screen would not switch off, time spent troubleshooting, or damage caused by a command you chose to send to your own equipment. Since the app is free, any liability that cannot be excluded is limited to what you paid for it, which is nothing.

This is not an attempt to disclaim carelessness on our part. Nothing here excludes responsibility for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow to be signed away.

Clause 09

Rights the law gives you anyway

You may be a consumer with statutory protections that no set of terms can shorten. Those protections stand untouched by this page. Where a clause above collides with a right granted by the consumer law of the place where you live, that right prevails and only the conflicting words fall away; the rest of the document continues to apply.

Clause 10

Ending it

Delete Perch and this arrangement is over, with nothing left to settle and no account to close. Your saved televisions and preferences are destroyed with the app; see section 07 of the privacy policy.

From our side, we may stop distributing Perch or stop issuing updates. Because the app depends on no server of ours, a copy already installed on your phone keeps working against your television for as long as your television and iOS keep speaking the same way. There is no remote kill switch and no licence check phoning home.

Clause 11

Edits to these terms

Later versions of the app may need different words here. When something meaningful changes, the revision number and date at the top of this page change with it, and the text published here is the one in force. Keeping the app installed after a change means the new text applies; if it does not suit you, clause 10 explains the way out.

Clause 12

Reaching a person