Terms of use

These terms govern your use of the Balise applications for macOS and iOS, and of thebalise.mgcrea.io website. By installing or using Balise, you accept them.

Licence

Balise is distributed on the App Store. Your licence to use it is Apple's Licensed Application End User License Agreement(the standard EULA), supplemented by these terms. It grants you a personal, non-exclusive right to use the application on the Apple devices you own or control.

The Pro unlock is a single non-consumable in-app purchase, priced at €9.90 including tax, tied to your Apple Account and restorable on the Apple devices you own or control. It is universal: bought on either platform, it is unlocked on the other. It is not a subscription: there is nothing to cancel, nothing to renew, and nothing that expires.

It unlocks four features, and only four: route drawing on the map, saving areas for offline use, the point-of-interest overlays, and syncing your library between your devices through your own private iCloud database. Everything else — every map layer, stacking and opacity, slope shading, GPX import and export, the elevation profile, place search — is free and stays free. Without Pro your library stays whole on each device, locally: nothing is deleted or made unreadable, only syncing between devices is inactive. Saving offline covers only the layers whose licence permits caching; Apple's basemap and IGN's restricted layers are excluded. The two heritage registers cover France alone; the mountain-hut overlay covers France, Switzerland and Spain. Elsewhere, Pro unlocks syncing, offline maps from the USGS layers, and route drawing without snapping to the footpath network, for want of an equivalent service.

The price shown is a launch price and may be raised for future purchases. A purchase already made is never charged again and never becomes a subscription. The amount actually billed is the one the App Store displays at the time of purchase, in your currency and with the tax applicable in your country of residence.

What you may not do

• Decompile, disassemble, or attempt to extract the application's source code.
• Rent, lend, resell or redistribute the application.
• Circumvent the licence restrictions applied to the map layers — in particular those that forbid offline caching.

The map data

Balise displays data published by the Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN) through the Géoplateforme, under the Licence Ouverte / Etalab 2.0. That licence permits free reuse, including commercial reuse, provided the source and the date of its last update are cited — which the application does in its interface and in the files it exports.

Some layers, including IGN's SCAN maps, fall under a different regime that does not permit redistribution in a consumer application. They are not offered in Balise until the question is settled with the producer.

Outside France, Balise displays swisstopo layers in Switzerland, governed by the FSDI terms, IGN España layers in Spain under CC BY 4.0, and USGS layers (“The National Map”) in the United States with its 3DEP elevation model. Produced by a United States federal agency, the last of these are in the public domain: their reuse carries no conditions, and the application credits them regardless. Every source is credited with its licence. Apple's basemap, where shown, remains governed by the MapKit terms of use: it is drawn by the system, never passes through the application, and can be neither saved nor exported.

A feature being paid changes none of these licences. The point overlays remain subject to their own obligations: attribution for all of them, share-alike for refuges.info. Those obligations attach to the data, not to the price of the application.

Some layers may additionally fall under the ODbL or CC BY-SA depending on their producer; their own attribution line is shown in the application's About the data window. If you republish a map produced with Balise, that attribution has to travel with it.

Mountain safety

Balise is a planning tool, not a safety device. The mapping, altitudes and gradients it displays come from public datasets that contain inaccuracies, areas that have not been updated, and outright errors. A path shown on the map may no longer exist; a slope computed at 29% may be 40% on the ground.

You remain solely responsible for your route decisions, your equipment and your assessment of conditions. Consult weather and avalanche bulletins, and never use a map — paper or screen — as the only source for committing to exposed terrain.

No warranty

The application is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. To the extent permitted by law, we cannot be held liable for indirect, incidental or consequential damage arising from its use. Nothing here restricts the rights that French law and consumer law grant you on a mandatory basis.

Refunds

Purchases go through the App Store: refund requests are made to Apple, at reportaproblem.apple.com. We have no control over those transactions.

Apple is the seller of record: its own sales contract applies, including the fourteen-day right of withdrawal available to consumers in the European Union. Write to us if a request goes nowhere; we cannot refund on Apple's behalf, but we can support the request.

Changes

These terms may be updated; the version in force is the one published here, with its date. Continuing to use the application after an update constitutes acceptance.

Governing law

These terms are governed by French law, and the French version is the binding one — this page is a translation provided for convenience. Publisher: Magenta Creations. Any questions: support@mgcrea.io.