Child Suitability Policy

1. What this app is, and who is in it

GraceHub is the member app of a single church. It carries that church's announcements, events, groups, sermons, giving and pastoral care, and it lets the members of that one congregation reach each other.

A congregation is not an audience of adults. It includes children in Sunday school, teenagers in youth ministry, and the parents of both. Some of the people holding this app are young, and some of the people who can message them are not. This page says plainly what that means in practice, so a parent, a church leader or a store reviewer can judge it without installing the app first.

GraceHub is rated 9+ on the App Store. It carries private messaging and member-written content, and it does not verify anyone's age. If you are deciding whether a child in your care should have it, sections 3 and 4 are the two to read.

2. The rating we declare, and why

On the App Store, GraceHub is rated 9+. That is the rating Apple calculates from our answers to its age questionnaire, not a number we chose. Google Play's rating is set by IARC from answers to the same facts.

Three of those answers are the reason the app is not rated for the youngest users:

• User-generated content: yes. Members write the messages, comments, group posts and care requests, and other members read them. We publish a church's own announcements; we do not write what a member types.
• Messaging and chat: yes. Members of the same church can message each other directly, and take part in the group conversations they belong to.
• Health or wellness topics: yes. Churches run marriage courses, grief support, addiction recovery and similar ministries, so material of that kind can appear in an announcement, a group or a sermon.

Everything else on Apple's list we answered as none or no, and section 5 sets out what that rules out. The rating is not the whole answer, which is why this page exists: 9+ describes the content, and the thing worth understanding about this app is not its content but who can contact whom.

3. Who may hold an account

Our Terms of Service set the rule: you must be 18 or older to open an account yourself, and a person under 18 may use the app only where their church has created the account with the consent of a parent or guardian, who accepts the Terms on the young person's behalf.

We do not ask for a date of birth when an account is created, and we do not verify anyone's age. That rule is kept by the church that runs the congregation, not by a check inside the app. If you do not want a child in your care to have an account, tell your church office and do not install the app on their phone.

What the app does enforce is that every account belongs to one named congregation. There is no global account, no anonymous account and no way to be in the app without being in somebody's church: a new member joins a specific church, that church's administrators are notified the moment they do, and those administrators can see the account and remove it.

4. What a young member can do

An account held by a fifteen-year-old is an ordinary member account. Unless their church has restricted it, they can:

• Read their church's announcements, events, groups and sermons, and watch a sermon video.
• Send and receive direct messages with other members of their church, including adults, and take part in the group conversations they belong to.
• Comment on a sermon, where other members of the church can read it.
• Submit a prayer or care request, which goes to the church's pastoral team.
• Upload a profile photo, and photos where a feature asks for one.
• See other members of their own church in the directory, to the extent their church has chosen to show it.

Every one of those is confined to one congregation. There is no public profile, no followers, no feed of strangers, no search that reaches outside your church, and no way for someone who is not a member of your church to message you or read anything you have written.

That containment is the real safeguard here, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not do. It means a young member cannot be approached by a stranger from the internet. It does not mean they cannot be approached by an adult from their own church. That is what a church app is for, and it is also, honestly, where the risk in this category of app actually sits. Section 7 is how we deal with it.

5. What is not in the app

• No advertising, and no third-party advertising or ad-tracking SDKs. Nothing in the app is trying to sell a young member anything.
• Nothing is sold inside the app. Giving and event payments open the church's secure payment page in the phone's own browser, where a card is entered. It is never entered on a screen we draw.
• No gambling, no simulated gambling, no loot boxes, no prize draws or contests.
• No in-app web browser. The app cannot be used to browse the web; the one embedded web view in the whole app is the sermon video player described in section 6.
• No dating, matching, stranger discovery or location sharing between members.
• No violence, sexual content, nudity, profanity, horror, or alcohol, tobacco and drug depictions in anything we publish.

Location deserves a specific note, because the app does ask for it. One feature uses it: a care responder who has started a visit can share their position with the church's care team while the app is open, so the office knows the visit is under way. It is not a member-to-member feature, and no member's location is broadcast to the congregation.

6. Content that does not come from us

Two things in the app come from outside it, and a parent should know about both.

Sermon video

Sermons play inside the app from the church's own YouTube channel. The player is limited to the videos that church has published. It is not YouTube, and it cannot be used to search or browse YouTube. YouTube's player may still offer a link out to YouTube itself; following it leaves GraceHub for the YouTube app or the phone's browser, where YouTube's own rules and whatever parental controls are set on the device take over.

Links other members send

A link typed into a message or a comment opens in the phone's browser, outside the app. That is deliberate, because it means the device's own content filters and parental controls apply to it, but it also means we have not checked where it goes. Treat a link in a church message the way you would treat any other link.

7. The safeguards on every account

• An automated filter blocks a message or comment that solicits sexual content involving a minor before it is ever published, and tells the sender why.
• Anything can be reported: a single message, a whole conversation, a comment, a group, an announcement, a care request, or a member. Reporting takes two taps and does not require an explanation.
• A report marked “child safety” is escalated past the church straight to our safety team, on the deliberate assumption that the person a child needs protecting from may be the person the report would otherwise land with.
• Any member can block another member immediately, without asking anyone. A blocked person cannot message you, cannot see your comments, is removed from every list you can pick a person from, and is not told.
• Child-safety reports are triaged ahead of everything else, with a 24-hour target, and a substantiated one ends the account permanently and is reported to the authorities.
• Church administrators can see who is in their congregation, control who appears in the directory and who may message whom, and remove an account.

The full detail of what is prohibited, how we investigate and who we report to is in our Child Safety Standards at https://grace-hub.co.za/child-safety. If a child is in immediate danger, contact the police (10111 in South Africa) or Childline on 116 first, and report to us afterwards.

8. What parents, guardians and churches can do

Parents and guardians

Ask the church office to remove the account, or to restrict what it can reach. They can do both, and they do not need us to do it for them. Because links and video open outside the app, the device's own controls (Screen Time on iOS, Family Link on Android) apply to everything the app hands off to the browser.

Church administrators

Decide which members appear in the directory, who may message whom, which features are switched on at all, and who holds pastoral and safeguarding permissions. An account can be suspended or removed from the church's admin console at any time.

Any member, at any age

Block, report, or write to safety@grace-hub.co.za. None of those require the church's permission, and a block takes effect immediately.

GraceHub has no parental-control panel of its own: no per-child content settings, no supervised mode, no age-graded feed. We answer Apple's questionnaire that way, and we say it here rather than letting the phrase “child safety” imply controls that do not exist.

9. Keeping this page accurate

We review this page whenever we ship something that changes what a young member can see or do, and again at every store submission. It is written from the app as built, not from the app as planned.

If you find something here that the app contradicts, the page is what is wrong and we want to know. Tell us and we will correct it.

Child safety and suitability

safety@grace-hub.co.za

Privacy and data requests

privacy@grace-hub.co.za

General support

info@aisoft.co.za

Company

AI Soft (Pty) Ltd, 332 Boundary Road, North Riding, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2169, South Africa