Terms of Service
Last updated 21 August 2026 · Effective 21 August 2026
These terms cover the Noricho iOS app and this website. Using either means you accept them. They are written to be read, not to be survived.
1. Who you are dealing with
Noricho is made and operated by an independent developer, not a company. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to any railway operator, and nothing in the app should be read as an operator’s statement. Line names, line colours and station numbers appear because they identify real services; every roundel, card and stamp illustration is original artwork drawn for Noricho.
2. Your account
- You may use Noricho without an account. Signing in adds sync, leaderboards and backup.
- You must be 13 or older to hold an account. If your country sets a higher digital-consent age, that age applies to you.
- You are responsible for the Apple or Google account you sign in with, and for what happens under yours.
- One person, one account.
3. Your handle and display name
If you make your profile public, the handle and display name you choose are shown to other riders. Choose something you would be happy to see on a leaderboard. You must not use a name that:
- impersonates another person, a railway operator, or Noricho itself;
- is a slur, is harassing, sexually explicit, or promotes hatred or violence;
- infringes a trademark or anyone else’s rights.
Names that break these rules may be removed or reset, and repeat offenders may lose their account. Report one to support@noricho.com and it will be dealt with.
4. Playing fairly
A stamp in Noricho is a claim that you were physically at a station. That claim is the entire point, so faking it spoils the thing you came for. You must not:
- spoof, simulate or replay location data, or use a modified build, an emulator or any tool intended to credit rides you did not take;
- automate the app, script it, or run it on someone else’s behalf to inflate a leaderboard;
- attack the service — probing it, overloading it, reverse-engineering the API to write to it, or trying to reach another rider’s data;
- scrape or bulk-extract the rail dataset or other riders’ profiles.
Rides that look fabricated may be refused, un-credited or removed from leaderboards, and accounts may be suspended. Manually entered rides are marked as such and never count towards leaderboards or leagues.
5. Ride outside your head, not inside your phone
Watch where you are going. Do not use Noricho while driving, while cycling, on a platform edge, while crossing tracks, or anywhere it would take your attention off your surroundings. Follow every instruction from railway staff and every rule of the operator whose train you are on. Nothing in the app is a reason to trespass, to enter a restricted area, or to travel without a valid ticket.
6. What is promised, and what is not
Noricho is provided as is. It is a hobby project maintained by one person, and it comes with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose.
Specifically, it is not promised that:
- the rail data is complete or correct — it is assembled from public datasets, and lines, stations and numbering change;
- every ride is credited correctly. GPS is imperfect, tunnels have no signal, and parallel lines confuse matching. That is why a ride can be reviewed and corrected;
- the service will be available, uninterrupted, or preserved indefinitely;
- realtime train information will be available on any given line, or at all.
Noricho is not a travel-planning tool. It has no timetables, no route planning, no fares and no delay alerts, and must not be relied on to catch a train or to be anywhere on time.
7. Liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, the developer is not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss arising from your use of Noricho, including missed trains, wasted fares or lost collection data. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded — and if your local consumer law gives you rights these terms cannot remove, you keep them.
8. What belongs to whom
The app, this site, the card and stamp artwork and the Noricho name belong to the developer. The underlying rail data is used under the licences listed on the data sources page, and those licences, not these terms, govern it. Anything you write — a handle, a display name, a support message — stays yours; by sending it you allow it to be stored and shown as this policy and these terms describe.
9. Ending it
You can stop at any time: delete your account in the app, or just delete the app. Account deletion is immediate and removes your rides, trails, stamps and progress. Access may be suspended or ended if these terms are broken, or if the service shuts down — in which case reasonable notice will be given here and in the app so you can export or screenshot what you care about.
10. Changes
These terms may change. The date at the top changes with them, and material changes will be announced in the app before they take effect. Continuing to use Noricho after that means you accept the new terms.
11. Law
These terms are governed by the laws of the developer’s country of residence, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and disputes go to the courts there — except where mandatory consumer law in your own country gives you the right to your own courts, which it may.