Terms of Use

Effective date: 23-Sep-2026

These terms are between you and Zilloris (“we”, “us”), the developer of Manuscript, an Android app published on Google Play as com.zilloris.manuscript. They cover version 1.0 and any later version that links to them.

The short version. Manuscript is a free, offline writing app. Everything you write stays on your phone. We claim no ownership of it and never receive it. Because there is no cloud copy, your backups are yours to make — use “a copy of everything” under “you”. The sections below are the ones that count; this summary is not a substitute for them.

1accepting these terms

By installing or using Manuscript, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not install it, or uninstall it.

Manuscript is made for adults and older teenagers. It is not directed at children under 13 and it is not part of Google Play’s Designed for Families programme.

There is no account and no sign-up, so there is nothing to register and nothing to cancel. Installing is the whole of it.

2your licence to use the app

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use Manuscript on devices you own or control, for your own writing. The app itself is licensed to you, not sold to you. We keep all rights in the app that we do not expressly grant here.

You may not:

• copy, redistribute, sell, rent, lease or sublicense the app, or make it available to others as if it were yours;
• modify the app or make derivative works of it, or distribute a modified copy;
• reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the app, or try to derive its source code — except to the extent that applicable law expressly permits this despite this restriction, and only within the limits that law allows;
• remove or obscure any notice of ownership in the app;
• use “Manuscript”, “Zilloris” or our marks to represent your own product.

This section is about the app. It says nothing about what you write in it — see the next section.

3your writing is yours

Everything you write in Manuscript belongs to you. Every page, every draft, every title, every line you keep.

We claim no ownership of it. We take no licence to it. We have no right to read, copy, publish, display, distribute, sell or analyse it, and no right to use it to train or improve any machine-learning model, ours or anyone else’s. Nothing in these terms gives us such a right, now or later.

This is not only a promise. It is how the app is built:

• There is no Manuscript server, and no backend belonging to us for your writing to be sent to.
• Your pages are plain text files inside the app’s own private storage on your phone, alongside a local database and a local settings file. Nothing copies them off the device.
• Android’s own backup is switched off for this app, so your drafts are not copied to Google Drive and are not carried across in a phone-to-phone transfer.
• The code in the app that can reach the network is Google’s — Firebase and Google Play — plus one request of the app’s own: when you open these terms or the privacy policy inside the app, it downloads the published page, so you read the current text. None of it can carry a word of your prose. Google’s code can carry event names, screen names and numbers, because the app’s analytics layer accepts no free text at all, by design; the app’s own request is handed nothing but the page’s address. What each one carries is set out in the privacy policy.
• The one way any of your writing leaves the phone is if you export it yourself, to a file, in a location you pick in your phone’s own file picker.

Because we never receive your writing, we cannot read it, cannot recover it, cannot moderate it, and have nothing to hand to anyone else.

4your backups are your responsibility

This is the most important practical thing in this document.

Manuscript keeps your writing in one place: your phone. There is no account, no cloud sync and no copy held by us. Android’s automatic backup is switched off for this app, so a factory reset, a lost or broken phone, or a move to a new phone will not bring your pages with it.

If the phone is gone and you have not written a copy out, the writing is gone. Not recoverable by you, and not recoverable by us — because there is no copy anywhere else to recover it from. That is the cost of an app with no server, and it is yours to plan around.

Making a copy takes two taps. In the app, go to “you” → “a copy of everything”. You can write out either of two files:

• “the words” — a plain .txt file of the draft currently on the desk. Readable in any text editor. It is words only; it cannot be put back into the app, and it does not include drafts sitting in the drawer.
• “everything, to put back” — a .manuscript file. This is the full copy: every draft, every page, the days, the streak, the keep, the red pen, the outline and your settings. It is the only file the app can restore from.

Both are written through your phone’s own file picker, to the place you choose. The app never writes a file anywhere you have not pointed at, and never uploads one.

A few things to know about those files:

• A .manuscript file is plain, unencrypted text with your pages inside it. Whoever holds the file can read the book. Keep it somewhere you trust. If you save it into a cloud folder, it is in that cloud, under that provider’s terms, and outside anything this app can control.
• Putting a copy back replaces what is on the phone — the pages, the days, the red pen, all of it. There is no undo, and if a restore fails part-way, what was on the phone may already be gone. Write a copy of what is there first.
• “delete everything” does exactly that, immediately and permanently. It cannot be undone, and files you exported earlier are not affected — they stay where you put them.

We recommend writing a .manuscript copy regularly and keeping it somewhere that is not this phone.

5acceptable use

Manuscript is an offline writing app that runs on your own device, so there is little for this section to police, and we will keep it short.

Do not use Manuscript to do anything unlawful, and do not use it to store material that is illegal for you to possess. Do not interfere with the app’s operation, its updates, or its distribution through Google Play, or use it in a way that harms other people or their devices.

We cannot see what you write and we do not try to. Staying within the law where you are is your responsibility, not something we can check or enforce.

6no warranty

Plainly: Manuscript is offered as it is, free, and we cannot promise it will never lose a page, never crash, and never behave badly on a phone we have never seen.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, MANUSCRIPT 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, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE APP WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE OR FREE OF DATA LOSS, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, OR THAT IT WILL WORK ON ANY PARTICULAR DEVICE OR VERSION OF ANDROID.

Nothing here removes rights you have as a consumer that cannot be excluded under the law where you live.

7limits on liability

Plainly: if something goes wrong, we will do what we can, but a free offline app cannot carry the value of an unbacked-up novel. That is why section 4 exists.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, ZILLORIS AND ITS DEVELOPERS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF DATA, LOSS OF WRITING, LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF GOODWILL OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR USE OF, OR INABILITY TO USE, MANUSCRIPT — WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE) OR OTHERWISE, AND WHETHER OR NOT WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY. TO THE SAME EXTENT, OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE APP OR THESE TERMS WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US FOR THE APP (WHICH, FOR VERSION 1.0, IS NOTHING) OR TEN UNITS OF YOUR LOCAL CURRENCY.

None of this applies to liability that cannot be excluded or limited by law — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, and any non-excludable consumer rights you have where you live.

8updates and changes to the app

We may change Manuscript over time: add features, change how existing ones work, or remove them. A later version may not behave exactly as this one does.

Updates are distributed by Google Play. Manuscript also uses Google Play’s in-app update mechanism, so it may offer you an update inside the app rather than sending you to the Play Store. Where a version is old enough that we consider it unsafe to keep running, the app may ask you to install the update before continuing. The update itself is delivered by Google Play, not by us directly.

Updating the app does not, by itself, remove what you have written; your pages and your history stay on the device across versions. We do not promise that Manuscript will be maintained, updated or available indefinitely, and we may stop publishing it. If we do, a copy already installed will keep working for as long as your phone and its version of Android allow — which is another reason to keep a .manuscript copy.

9price

Manuscript version 1.0 is free. There are no ads, no subscription and no in-app purchases; the app contains no billing code at all, and there is nothing in it that can charge you.

If a future version of Manuscript is ever paid, that would apply to that version and would be made clear before you install or buy it. We will not retroactively charge for a copy you already have, and a version you have already installed will not start asking for money on its own.

10third-party services

Manuscript relies on services we do not run. Their terms govern their part, and we are not responsible for them:

• Google Play distributes the app and delivers its updates, including the in-app update prompt. Google Play’s terms of service apply to that.
• Google Firebase — Analytics, Crashlytics and Remote Config — handles a small amount of usage and crash information, and supplies the app with the addresses of this document and the privacy policy. Google processes that data on our behalf. What is collected is described in the privacy policy.
• GitHub Pages, a GitHub service, publishes this document and the privacy policy at zilloris.com. When you open either one inside the app, the app downloads it from there, and GitHub’s terms apply to that request.
• Your phone’s file picker, and wherever you save a copy. When you export a file, it lands in a place you chose. If that place is a cloud drive or another app’s folder, the file is then subject to that service’s terms, and Manuscript has no visibility into it and no control over it.

Linking to or relying on these services is not an endorsement of them, and their availability is not something we can promise.

11ending it

You can stop at any time. Uninstall Manuscript and it is over — there is no account to close and no subscription to cancel.

Uninstalling removes the app’s files from your device, and that includes your writing. Anything you exported earlier stays where you put it. Nothing comes back on reinstall.

Your licence under section 2 ends automatically if you materially breach these terms; if that happens, stop using the app and uninstall it. Sections 3, 6, 7, 12 and 14 survive the end of these terms.

12changes to these terms

We may update these terms — for example when the app changes. When we do, we change the effective date at the top and publish the new version at the address the app links to under “you” → “terms of use”. If a change is significant, we will make a reasonable effort to draw attention to it.

Continuing to use Manuscript after the new terms take effect means you accept them. If you do not, uninstall the app.

13contact

Questions about these terms: support@zilloris.com

Manuscript is made by Zilloris.

Its privacy policy is published alongside this document and is linked in the app under “you”.