Terms of Use

Effective 25 August 2026 · Last updated 25 August 2026

These terms are the agreement between you and Rytme (“Rytme”, “we”, “us”) for the Rytme iPhone app, the Rytme Apple Watch app, and this website. Using Rytme means you accept them. If you do not, do not use the app. What we do with your data is a separate document: the Privacy Policy.

1. What Rytme is

Rytme paces run-walk-run intervals, tracks your run, and — if you want it — lets a team of people you chose follow that run live and send you text messages and recorded voice cheers that play aloud while you are running. It is free, and it is currently in beta, which means parts of it will change.

There is no account, no sign-up, and no email address. Your device signs in anonymously so the security rules can tell teams apart. That also means we normally cannot identify you as a person, only as a device on a team under the display name you typed in yourself.

2. Teams are private, and there is no public feed

Worth stating plainly, because it shapes everything below. Rytme has no public timeline, no discovery, no search for people, no recommendations, and no way to arrive at a stranger. The only place content exists is inside a team, and:

• A team is created by one person, who is its creator.
• Joining takes the team's ID or QR code and the creator's approval. Knowing an ID on its own gets you nothing — until you are approved you cannot read the roster, the map, or a single message.
• A message is only ever delivered to approved members of that one team.
• Any member can leave at any time, and we can remove someone from a team when a report warrants it.

So the only people who can send you anything in Rytme are people someone approved into a team with you. That does not make abuse impossible. It does mean the rest of this page has a short list of names on it rather than the whole internet.

3. Zero tolerance for objectionable content and abusive behaviour

Rytme has zero tolerance for objectionable content and for abusive people. Do not send, record, or upload any of the following — in a text message, in a voice cheer, or in a display name or a team name:

• Harassment or bullying — targeting someone, piling on, or repeatedly contacting a person who does not want to hear from you
• Hate speech and slurs — attacking or demeaning anyone over race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, age, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation
• Threats and violence — threatening harm, encouraging self-harm, or glorifying violence
• Sexual content — sexually explicit or suggestive material of any kind, and anything at all that sexualises a minor
• Impersonation — using a display name to pass yourself off as someone else, or joining a team under a false identity
• Spam — advertising, promotion, chain messages, or flooding a team
• Other people's private information — posting someone's address, phone number, or anything else that exposes them
• Illegal activity, and anything that breaks the law where you are

Do not attack the app itself either: no scraping, no reverse engineering, no going at the backend, no automated accounts, and no getting into a team you were not approved for.

There is no tolerance level here to work out. One message that is a slur, a threat, or sexual content is enough to end your access to Rytme's team features for good.

4. Filtering and removal

Text messages are checked twice against a list of prohibited words and phrases: on your device before the message is sent, and again on our server before it goes out to anybody's phone. The check is built to see through the usual dodges — letters swapped for digits, characters repeated, punctuation or spaces pushed between letters.

A message that fails the check is not sent on. Nobody's phone buzzes, nothing is read aloud mid-run, and the message itself is replaced in the team's list with a line saying it was removed for breaking the rules. The sender is not told which word did it, and there is no way to appeal a filtered message back into existence. Write a different one.

A recorded voice cheer is not transcribed, so no automatic filter runs over it. Voice is covered the other way round: report it and we listen to it ourselves. Everything in section 3 applies to a voice cheer exactly as it applies to text, and section 6 applies the same way.

No word list catches everything, and it is not meant to be the whole system. Reporting is.

5. Reporting a message, and blocking a person

Both live on the message itself. In Team → Messages, touch and hold any message from someone else:

• Report Message sends that message, who sent it, and which team it was in to us for review, and hides it from you straight away.
• Block stops that person reaching you at all: their messages disappear from your list, nothing of theirs is read aloud during a run, and our server stops sending you notifications from them. It takes effect immediately, and you do not have to leave the team to do it.

The hand icon in the top right of the Messages screen lists everyone you have blocked, so you can undo one later if you want to.

Reports come to us at [email protected], where a person reads them. We aim to act on a report within 24 hours. You can email that address directly too — with the team ID and the display name involved — for anything a long press cannot reach, such as a voice cheer, a display name, or a team name.

6. What happens to people who break the rules

Depending on what happened, and without notice:

• The message is removed and replaced with a removal notice.
• The person is removed from the team.
• The device's anonymous identity is barred from Rytme's team features, which ends its access to every team it is in.

For anything at the serious end of section 3 — slurs, threats, sexual content, anything involving a minor — it is the last one, first time. There is no strike system. Where something looks like a crime we will report it to the police, and we will keep whatever we need to keep in order to do that.

Deciding what breaks these rules is our call. We would rather be too strict in someone's team than leave a runner listening to abuse through their headphones at mile nine.

7. Your content

What you write and record stays yours. Sending it to a team gives us permission to store it and deliver it to that team's approved members, which is the only thing we do with it. We do not sell it, publish it, use it to train anything, or show it to anyone outside the team — apart from reading a message that has been reported to us, which is the point of a report. The Privacy Policy covers how long things are kept.

You are responsible for what you send and for having the right to send it, including a voice recording with someone else's voice in it.

8. Age

Rytme is not for children under 13. Teams often include family, and a parent or guardian is responsible for any child they add to one — both for what that child sends and for what the rest of that team can send to them.

9. Running is your responsibility

Rytme is a training aid, not a coach and not a medical device. Its paces, intervals, and ghost pacer are arithmetic on numbers you typed in. They are not advice about whether you should be running, how hard, or with what condition. Ask a doctor about that. Watch the road rather than your phone, and keep enough hearing free to notice traffic when cheers are playing aloud.

10. Availability and liability

Rytme is provided as it is, with no promise that it will be available, accurate, or free of faults, and no warranty of any kind beyond what the law where you live gives you and we cannot take away. It is in beta: features will change, and the app or any part of it can stop working or be withdrawn.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost runs or lost data, for a message that did not arrive or arrived late, or for what another member of your team does. Rytme is free, so where liability cannot be excluded at all it is limited to what you have paid us, which is nothing.

11. Apple

You get Rytme through Apple, but Apple is not a party to these terms and is not responsible for the app or anything in it. Apple has no obligation to support it, and if the app turns out to be defective, Apple's only obligation is to refund the purchase price — again, nothing.

12. Ending it

You can stop at any time: leave a team to end your membership of it, or delete the app to remove your runs and your settings from your device. We can suspend or end your access to Rytme's team features if you break these terms, and for a serious breach we will do it immediately and without warning. Sections 6, 7, 10, and 11 carry on afterwards.

13. Changes to these terms

If these terms change materially we will update the date at the top and note it in the app's What's New. Continuing to use Rytme after a change means you accept the updated terms.

14. Contact

Abuse reports, questions about these terms, and anything else: [email protected]. For anything about your data, [email protected].