Blip Terms of Service

Effective: 13 September 2026
Last updated: 13 September 2026

The short version

• This agreement is between you and Andrew Bui — one person in California who built Blip and runs it. Not a company, and not Apple.
• You must be 13 or older. Under 13, you may not use Blip at all. If you are 13 to 17, a parent or guardian has to agree to these terms for you.
• When you type in a Blip conversation, the other people in it see your words as you type them. Not a "typing…" indicator — the actual text, transmitted off your device before you press send. That is the app, and it cannot be switched off inside a conversation. Type accordingly.
• What you write stays yours. We get a narrow licence to store it, carry it, and show it to the people you sent it to. Nothing else: no training machine-learning models on it, no marketing, no selling it.
• Harassment, threats, and anything sexual involving a child will cost you your account. Child sexual abuse material is reported to NCMEC and the account is terminated.
• Reporting someone also blocks them. Reports are read by one person — me — so review is not instant, and these terms do not promise you a response time.
• You can delete your account yourself, in Profile → Delete account. It takes your messages with it.
• Blip is free. No purchases, no subscriptions, no ads, and no payment details are ever collected.
• No arbitration clause and no class-action waiver. California law governs, and the courts in Los Angeles County are the venue — but your right to a judge, a jury, and to join with other people is left alone.

The rest is the detail. Read §4 even if you read nothing else.

1. Who you are agreeing with

Blip is an iOS app operated by Andrew Bui, an individual in California, United States. In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean him.

Blip is not a company. There is no team, no support desk and no night shift. Where that matters — how quickly a report gets looked at, for instance — these terms say so plainly instead of implying otherwise.

By creating a Blip account, or by using Blip, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use Blip.

Our Privacy Policy explains what happens to your information, and it is part of this agreement. Where these terms mention data, the privacy policy is the precise version.

2. Who can use Blip

You must be at least 13 years old. If you are under 13 you may not create an account or use Blip, and we will delete any account we find belonging to someone under 13.

When you sign up we ask for your date of birth and check it on our server before your account is finished. If the date says you are under 13, the account created a moment earlier is deleted immediately. We do not keep the date. We also do not verify it — it is self-declared, and giving a false one to get past that check is a breach of these terms (§6).

If you are 13 to 17, or under the age of majority where you live, you may use Blip only if a parent or guardian has read these terms and agrees to them on your behalf. By using Blip you are telling us that this has happened. We have no way to check it, which is precisely why your honesty about it matters. If you are a parent or guardian and you do not agree, ask your child to stop using Blip and write to privacy@tryblip.app to have the account deleted.

You also confirm that the law where you live does not bar you from using a service like Blip, and that we have not previously terminated your account for breaking these terms.

3. Your account

• Your password is yours to look after. Use one you do not use anywhere else. Anything done under your account is treated as done by you. If you think someone else has got in, change your password and write to support@tryblip.app.
• One person per account. Do not share your account, do not let anyone else use it, and do not use anyone else's — not a friend's, not a family member's, not one you came across.
• Do not impersonate anyone. Not another Blip user, not someone who has never used Blip, not an organisation you have nothing to do with.
• Some usernames are reserved. In an app where the only way to find a stranger is to know their exact username, a handle that looks official is a phishing tool: "message @support to verify your account" costs nothing to set up, and there is no verified badge here to contradict it. Names like admin, support, safety, security, staff, moderator, help, billing and system are reserved: sign-up refuses them and reports them as taken. Claiming one by any other route is a breach of these terms, and so is a lookalike.
• Keep your email address current. It is how you recover your account and how we reach you about it.

Usernames are first come, first served. We may reclaim one that impersonates a person or organisation, infringes a trademark, or is being used in breach of these terms.

4. Live typing, and what you are agreeing to

Blip's defining feature is that the people in a conversation see what you are typing, as you type it, before you send it. Not an indicator that you are typing: the words themselves.

To make that work, the text you type is transmitted off your device — through our servers, on to the other people in that conversation — before you send it. By using Blip you understand and accept that.

What follows from it:

• Anything you type into a Blip conversation can be read by the other people in it straight away,
  whether or not you ever send it.
• Deleting what you typed does not un-see it. They may already have read it. There is no recall.
• They can screenshot it, record it, or simply remember it — including the part you decided not to send. We cannot prevent that and we do not try to.
• It cannot be turned off inside a conversation. It is what Blip is.

There are limits on it, and they exist for your benefit rather than ours:

• In a one-to-one conversation, your typing is not relayed until each of you has sent at least one message. So a stranger who knows your username can write to you, but cannot watch you compose a reply you never send.
• In a group, live typing starts once a message has actually been sent in that group. Being added to a group where nothing has been said does not start it. The flip side, stated rather than left to be assumed: in a group that is live, every member who can see the conversation sees you typing, not only the person you are answering.
• Blocking takes it away. In a two-person conversation, blocking locks live typing and clears any unsent text of theirs that was already in flight.

Treat anything you type in Blip as something you have said out loud. If you would not want someone reading a half-finished thought, do not type it in Blip.

The Privacy Policy explains how unsent text is handled: where it goes, how briefly it is kept, and what is never done with it. This section is where you agree to it.

5. Your content, and the licence you give us

You own what you write. Your messages, your photos, your videos. Sending them through Blip transfers nothing to us.

To run the app, you give us a licence to store your content, transmit it, and display it to the people you sent it to — and to make the technical copies and format changes that requires. Two concrete examples: a photo is re-encoded before upload, which is also what strips its EXIF data including GPS coordinates; a video's container is rewritten before upload to drop location and recording-device metadata.

That is the entire licence. It is non-exclusive, royalty-free, and it exists so that Blip can work. It does not include:

• training machine-learning models. We do not do this with your content, and we grant no one else the right to.
• marketing. Your messages, photos and videos will not turn up in an App Store screenshot, an advert, or a demo.
• selling or sharing your content with anyone, for anything.

The licence ends when the content does. Delete a message, or delete your account, and it ends — except for copies other people have already saved outside Blip, which we cannot reach, and whatever Google retains in its own operational logs for the services Blip runs on, which are kept under Google's retention and not under our control.

You confirm that you have the right to send what you send.

6. What you may not do

This is the section that matters most for other people's safety, so it is specific rather than a wall of prohibitions.

Towards people

• No harassment. Do not bully, threaten, stalk or intimidate anyone, and do not organise or encourage others to.
• Nothing sexual involving a minor. No sexual content involving anyone under 18, in any form, and no sexualising a child in any way — no grooming, no soliciting, no sexual talk directed at a minor. Child sexual abuse material is reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), as United States law requires, and the account is terminated. No warning, no second chance.
• No intimate images of someone who did not agree to you sharing them, and no threatening to share them.
• No violent or hateful campaigns. Do not promote or glorify terrorism or mass violence, do not encourage anyone to hurt themselves, and do not attack people for their race, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation.
• No doxxing. Do not publish someone's private information — home address, phone number, workplace, images of them — without their permission.
• No spam. No chain messages, no bulk unsolicited messages, no advertising at people who did not ask for it.
• No impersonation, of a person or an organisation (§3).
• Do not evade a block. If someone blocks you, do not come back through another account, and do not use a group you both belong to as a way to reach them.
• Do not break the law, and do not use Blip to help anyone else break it.
• Do not infringe anyone's copyright, trademark or other rights.

Towards the age gate, and other people's accounts

• Do not lie about your age, and do not help anyone under 13 get onto Blip — not by entering a date of birth for them, not by making the account, not by lending them yours.
• Do not use anyone else's account, do not try to obtain someone's password, and do not try to reach a conversation you are not part of.

Towards the service

• No automated access. No bots, no scripts, no client other than the Blip app.
• No scraping. Do not crawl, harvest or enumerate accounts, usernames, conversations or content, by any means. Username lookup exists so a friend can find you, not so anyone can build a list.
• No reverse engineering. Do not decompile, disassemble or modify the app, and do not try to defeat the checks that confirm a request came from the real Blip app.
• No security testing without a written agreement with us. If you find something, tell us at safety@tryblip.app — we would much rather hear from you.
• Do not interfere with anyone else's use of Blip, or with the infrastructure it runs on.

Breaking this section can cost you your account. For the child-safety items, it will.

7. Groups

• Anyone can create a group, and whoever creates it is its administrator.
• A group has exactly one administrator. Only they can rename it, change its photo, add or remove people, or delete it.
• Any member can leave at any time. The administrator can leave too, but because a group always has exactly one administrator, they have to hand it to another member on the way out — and that member has to be someone already in the group. An administrator who is the last one left has nobody to hand it to: they can add someone, or delete the group.
• If an administrator deletes their Blip account, the group passes to whoever has been in it longest, so nobody loses a shared conversation because its creator left.
• Being removed from a group ends your access immediately — its messages, and its members' live typing. Blip keeps no copy of any of it for you. One limitation we would rather state than let you assume away: a download link the app had already obtained for a photo or video you were shown before you left keeps working until that file is deleted.
• A group is a room, and its past is open to whoever gets added to it. Someone you add can read what the group has already said, not only what comes after them: the server authorises reading a group's messages by who is in it now, and the app loads the most recent stretch of the conversation. Two consequences worth saying out loud. Adding a person shows them history that other members wrote. And anything you say in a group may be read by somebody who is not in it yet.
• Do not add people to groups they have not agreed to join, and do not use a group to get around a block.

8. Reporting, blocking, and what happens next

Blocking. You can block anyone. It stops their messages reaching you, stops their notifications, and — the part that matters most in an app like this — stops their live typing: blocking locks live typing in your two-person conversation and clears any draft of theirs already in flight. It is enforced on our servers, not merely hidden in the app. Two honest limits. In a group you both belong to, their messages still appear, because one member must not be able to silence another for everybody else (using a shared group to get around a block is a breach of §6). And blocking is not retroactive: messages already in a conversation stay there. Your block list is private.

Reporting. You can report a message or a person from inside the app. Two things happen together:

• The report is filed — with a copy of the reported message's text as our server read it (or a pointer to the photo or video), who sent it, who reported it, and which conversation it was in. The privacy policy says what is kept and for how long.
• That person is blocked, in the same action. Reporting and blocking are not two decisions you have to remember to make separately.

What we can do about it. We can remove a reported message, and we can disable an account — which stops that person signing in again and revokes the token their device would use to renew its session. Two things disabling does not do, and both are stated because assuming otherwise would be worse than knowing. It does not cut the session off the instant it happens: the sign-in token already on their device stays valid until it refreshes, up to an hour, and nothing shortens that. And it does not erase what they have already sent. Removing someone's past messages is done message by message. That is slower, and it is the honest description of it.

Who reviews it, and how fast. One person: me. There is no moderation team, no 24-hour rota, and no console for browsing conversations — reading a report is the only routine reason a human sees message content, and unsent text is never reviewed. Every report is read. What these terms will not claim is triage: there is no priority queue and nothing alerts me when a report is filed, so a report about a child sits in the same list as a report about spam until somebody opens it. These terms do not promise a response time, because a promise like that, from one person, would not be worth the words.

So if a matter is urgent — anything involving a child, anything that reads as a credible threat — send it to safety@tryblip.app, which is also where anything the in-app flow does not cover goes. And block the person in the app: that takes effect straight away and does not wait for me.

If you think a decision about your account was wrong, write to safety@tryblip.app and say why. It reaches the person who made the decision, and it will be read. There is no formal appeals process — claiming one would be the same kind of overstatement this section exists to avoid.

9. Ending it

You can leave whenever you like. Profile → Delete account deletes your account straight away, and takes your messages with it everywhere they appear — including direct conversations, which go in full, since a two-person thread with one person removed is not meaningfully anyone else's history. The privacy policy lists exactly what is removed. It cannot be undone.

We may suspend or remove your account if you break these terms, if the law requires it, or if leaving it in place would put other people or the service at serious risk. Where we reasonably can, we will tell you why and give you a chance to answer — except where telling you would be unlawful, would compromise an investigation, or where the breach is one of the severe ones (child safety, credible threats of violence), in which case the account goes first.

Ending this agreement does not undo what is already done. The parts of these terms covering content you have already sent, the disclaimers in §11, the liability limits in §12, and the governing law in §14 continue to apply.

10. Blip is free

There is nothing to buy: no purchases, no subscriptions, no in-app currency, no ads, and no payment information is ever collected. If that ever changes, it will be a change to these terms under §15, and you will be told before it takes effect.

11. Blip is provided as it is

To the fullest extent the law allows, Blip is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. In plain terms, we do not promise that:

• Blip will be available, uninterrupted or error-free — it runs on Google Firebase, and when Google has an outage, Blip has an outage;
• a message will always be delivered, or delivered promptly;
• live typing will always reach the other person — it depends on both people's network connections, and it is the first thing to suffer when one of them is poor;
• nothing will ever be lost.

Two specific things, because assuming otherwise could hurt you:

• Blip is not end-to-end encrypted. Your connection is encrypted in transit (TLS) and your data is encrypted at rest by Google Cloud, but we — and Google, as our hosting provider — are technically able to read what you send. Do not use Blip for information whose exposure would seriously harm you. The privacy policy states this precisely.
• Blip is not an emergency service. Do not rely on it to reach anyone in an emergency, or in any situation where an undelivered message could lead to injury, death or serious loss.

Some places do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

12. Limits on liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data or lost goodwill, arising out of your use of Blip or your inability to use it — even if we had been told such damage was possible.

About the cap. Consumer terms usually limit total liability to "the amount you paid in the last 12 months". Blip is free, so that amount is zero, and a cap of zero is a strange thing to write down and call a limit. So, instead: where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability to you for all claims taken together is limited to one hundred United States dollars (USD 100), however many claims there are.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including, in many places, liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or under consumer-protection law that applies to you whatever a contract says.

13. Apple

Blip is distributed through the Apple App Store, and Apple requires these terms to include the following. It is not filler — read it once.

• These terms are between you and Andrew Bui, not Apple. Apple is not a party to this agreement. As between us and Apple, we — not Apple — are solely responsible for Blip and its content.
• Your licence to Blip is a limited, non-transferable licence to use it on an Apple-branded product that you own or control, as permitted by the Usage Rules in the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions, except that Blip may also be accessed and used by other accounts associated with you through Family Sharing or volume purchasing. Your use of Blip must not conflict with those Usage Rules.
• Apple has no obligation whatsoever to furnish any maintenance or support services for Blip.
• Warranties. Blip is free, so there is no purchase price. In the event of any failure of Blip to conform to an applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price, if any — which, for Blip, is nothing. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation whatsoever with respect to Blip, and any other claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs or expenses attributable to a failure to conform to a warranty are our sole responsibility, to the extent they cannot be disclaimed under applicable law.
• Apple is not responsible for addressing any claim of yours or of any third party relating to Blip or your possession and use of it — including product liability claims, any claim that Blip fails to conform to a legal or regulatory requirement, and claims arising under consumer protection, privacy or similar legislation. We are.
• Intellectual property claims. If a third party claims that Blip, or your possession and use of it, infringes their intellectual property rights, we — not Apple — are solely responsible for the investigation, defence, settlement and discharge of that claim.
• You represent and warrant that you are not located in a country that is subject to a United States Government embargo, or that has been designated by the United States Government as a "terrorist supporting" country, and that you are not listed on any United States Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
• You must comply with applicable third-party terms when using Blip — your wireless data plan, for example.
• Apple and Apple's subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms as they relate to your licence to use Blip. On your acceptance of these terms, Apple has the right — and is deemed to have accepted the right — to enforce these terms against you as a third-party beneficiary.
• Questions, complaints and claims about Blip come to us, at support@tryblip.app, not to Apple.

14. Governing law, and where a dispute goes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Any court proceeding relating to these terms or to Blip will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Los Angeles County, California, and each of us consents to the personal jurisdiction of those courts and waives any objection to venue there. If the law where you live gives you the right to bring a claim in your local courts, or the protection of your own country's law, these terms do not take that away.

There is no arbitration clause in these terms, and no class-action waiver. That is deliberate. You keep the right to have a dispute heard by a judge, to a jury where one is available, and to join with other people in a claim. Small claims court remains open to either of us for a claim that qualifies.

15. Changes

Changes to Blip. We may add features, change them, or remove them.

Changes to these terms. Every change updates the "Last updated" date at the top of this document, and where a change materially affects you we will also email the address on your account. There is no in-app change notice today, and these terms will not promise one before it is built. Continuing to use Blip after a change takes effect means you accept the new terms. If you do not accept them, delete your account (§9) — that option is always there, and it is all you have to do.

16. Copyright complaints

If you believe something sent through Blip infringes your copyright, write to legal@tryblip.app with:

• enough detail to identify the work you say has been infringed;
• enough detail to find the content you are complaining about;
• your name and contact details;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the rights holder, its agent or the law;
• a statement that the information in your notice is accurate, and — under penalty of perjury — that you are the owner of the right you say has been infringed, or are authorised to act on the owner's behalf; and
• your physical or electronic signature. Typing your full name at the end of the notice counts as an electronic signature.

A notice missing the signature or the statement under penalty of perjury is not a valid notice under 17 U.S.C. §512, and we may ask you for the missing part before acting on it.

We remove infringing content, and we terminate the accounts of people who infringe repeatedly.

17. Notice for California users

Under California Civil Code section 1789.3, California users are entitled to this notice: the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs can be reached in writing at 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or by telephone at (800) 952-5210. You can reach us at support@tryblip.app.

18. The rest

• Severability. If part of these terms is held unenforceable, that part is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these terms. We may transfer ours if Blip changes hands, with notice to you.
• Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about Blip, and they replace anything said before.
• No other third-party rights, apart from Apple's under §13.
• Language. These terms were written in English, and the English version controls.
• Blip is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Apple or Google.

19. Contact

Blip is operated by Andrew Bui, California, United States. If you need a postal address to serve a formal legal notice, ask at legal@tryblip.app and one will be provided.