Terms of service

Dev Mutual is operated by CodeEnsis Ltd, registered in Cyprus. By creating an account you agree to what follows. If something here does not work for you, write to [email protected] before signing up rather than after.

What the service is

A barter market for developer attention. You test somebody else’s app and write a report about it; you earn credits; you spend credits to have your own app tested. No money moves through this service in either direction.

Credits are not money

• Credits cannot be bought, sold, transferred between accounts, or exchanged for anything outside this service.
• They have no cash value, and closing your account or ours does not make them redeemable for anything.
• A test costs 12 credits, of which 10 reach the tester and 2 leave circulation. That sink is deliberate — without it credits inflate and the queue stops moving.

The rule this whole service is built around

A public review in an app store earns nothing here. We never require one, never reward one, never check whether you left one, and never store a link to one. After you send a report we may show a link to the app’s store page, and what you do there is entirely your business and entirely unpaid.

This is not a formality. A review that is paid for is an incentivized review, which breaks the rules of both Google Play and the App Store and gets developer accounts banned. If you try to trade reviews for credits through this service — by asking for them in your test instructions, or by offering them — we will close your account.

If you submit an app

• You must own it or be authorised to represent whoever does. Every app is checked by a person before it enters the queue.
• Ask for something a tester can actually do in a few minutes, and something legal. No asking people to create accounts on third-party services, spend money, or hand over personal data.
• You have 48 hours to accept a report or dispute it with a reason. Stay silent and it is accepted automatically and the tester is paid — the clock protects them, not you. Miss the deadline 3 times in a row and your app is paused until you deal with it.
• Disputes are settled by us. We look at the report and the screenshots, and we decide. We aim to be fair rather than fast.

If you test an app

• Actually install it and actually do what was asked. Reports invented without opening the app are fraud against a person who paid for your attention.
• Write your own words — at least 80 characters per answer and 300 in total. Machine-generated filler counts as an invented report.
• Screenshots must be yours, taken on your device, from this session. Uploading someone else’s picture is grounds for closing your account.
• You keep 24 hours from claiming a task to finishing it. After that it returns to the queue and the developer gets their credits back.
• By uploading a screenshot you allow us to store it and show it to the developer whose app you tested and to our administrators when a dispute needs settling. Nothing else.

Accounts

One account per person. The starting bonus of 24 credits exists to get you into the loop, not to be farmed with a second address — we treat one mailbox as one account regardless of dots or plus-tags in the address.

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these rules. Where the situation allows it we will say why and give you a chance to answer first; where it does not — fraud, abuse of other members — we will not.

You can close your own account at any time by writing to us. See the privacy page for what happens to your data.

What we do not promise

The service is provided as it is. We do not promise that your app will get tested, that a report will be useful, that the site will be available at any particular moment, or that nothing will ever be lost. We take backups and we test that they restore, but we do not guarantee against every failure.

We are not liable for what other members write about your app, for what you do with advice you get here, or for indirect losses. Nothing in this section removes liability that the law does not let us remove.

Changes

We may change these terms. If a change matters — the economics, your rights, the rules above — we will email you before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept it.

Law

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of Cyprus, and its courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer in the EU, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory law of the country you live in.