FAQ

No. KinTerm has no accounts — open it and start. We do not ask for an email address, a name, a phone number or a date of birth.

On your phone, working without the internet day to day, with no servers of ours. Premium adds iCloud / Google auto sync, which you turn on yourself; once on, it writes a backup to your own iCloud or Google storage, and we are never involved. You can also use a backup file you export yourself.

Free: kinship chains up to five steps, the Taiwan vocabulary, 5 family members, 5 dates, 5 red envelope records, today's almanac and this year's calendar, a preview of 3 good days per occasion, basic greeting templates, and the Chinese festivals and upcoming temple days. Premium, NT$60 once: seven regional vocabularies with spoken pronunciation; unlimited members, dates and records; a photo album per relative; vertical PDF family tree; the 1900–2100 calendar with day search and the monthly focus; zodiac fortune; seasonal foods, the daily fortune stick and temple-day and festival reminders; name matching and baby-name suggestions; four greeting tones with your signature; gift records exported as a table; cloud backup; dark theme and large type.

Tell us on the contact page: which chain, which regional vocabulary, and what you expected instead. We maintain a widely accepted vocabulary and will review it and correct it in the next release.

Keeping seven vocabularies accurate (Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, Hokkien, Hakka, Singapore and Malaysia) means having local friends proofread them for years, and that is part of what Premium pays for. The free version stays on Taiwan usage, which already covers most users in Taiwan.

Premium: first update the app to the latest version on both phones. Then, on the new phone, sign in to the same Apple ID or Google account, tap "Restore Purchase" first, then turn on auto sync. When the app finds that the cloud already holds a backup from another device, it pauses and shows a notice at the bottom of the screen; go to Settings and choose "Use cloud copy", and your data and photos come across. You can also use a backup file: on the old phone open "Advanced" in Settings and tap "Share backup file", then on the new phone open "Advanced" and tap "Restore from backup file". Between iPhone and Android, use a backup file; purchases are not shared between the two, so you need to buy Premium on the new platform. Auto sync and backup files are both Premium features, and the free version has no way of its own to move your data. That said, if the old phone has its system backup turned on (iCloud Backup on iPhone, Google backup on Android), setting up the new phone with the same account and restoring from that backup usually brings the app's data along. That is handled by the phone's system, only works between phones of the same platform, and how much comes back is up to the system, so it isn't guaranteed to be complete.

No. Purchases on iPhone are held against your Apple ID and purchases on Android against your Google account, and the two stores do not share them.

The normal direction is you pick the chain and it names the relative (father, then brother, gives you your uncle). Reverse lookup goes the other way: you have heard a term — "my great-uncle's granddaughter" — and the app reconstructs the chain, then tells you what they should call you. Useful when someone greets you first.

Each step records four things: sex, generation, whether it runs through the father's side, the mother's side or a spouse, and seniority among siblings. "Father's older brother" is male, one generation up, paternal and senior — which gives the specific term for a paternal uncle older than your father. The legal degree of kinship is worked out alongside it, which matters for inheritance and marriage registration.

The same blood relation is named differently from place to place. "Mother's father", for example, is 外公 or 阿公 in Taiwan, 姥爺 in mainland China and 公公 in Hong Kong. The app ships seven vocabularies (Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, Hokkien, Hakka, Singapore and Malaysia); switch the region and every term changes with it (Premium).

Each member can have a birthday, a deceased marker and an optional portrait; Premium adds an album for every relative. Photos are chosen through the system photo picker, so the app receives only the ones you pick. They are copied into the app's own space and stored on your phone, and the app never reads your whole library. Only if you turn on Premium auto sync or export a backup file do the photos go along, into your own cloud storage or that backup file.

A Premium feature. It exports a traditionally set vertical PDF, running top to bottom and right to left, with names, years of birth and the deceased marker. The fonts are built into the file, so Chinese names display correctly even on a computer without Chinese fonts, instead of showing empty boxes. Printed on A4 it can be bound and given to your parents.

The almanac data is built into the app and works entirely offline: daily suitable and unsuitable activities, the clash, the household spirit, lunar dates, solar terms and festivals. It reflects what the traditional almanacs commonly say, and different traditions and different printed almanacs have always disagreed in places. Treat it as a reference rather than the last word, and for anything that really matters, check it against your elders or a source you trust.

The suggestion comes from a built-in table — no network, no AI — matching the relationship (in-laws, a nephew, your boss) with the occasion (New Year, a wedding, a one-month celebration) and the region, based on what is commonly given. It gives a range rather than a figure, and how close you are and what you can afford still decide it. If the range feels high, go to the bottom of it; nobody considers a gift within the customary range impolite.

Not at present. The app supports stepping through the chain (father, mother, younger brother, and so on) and reverse lookup from a term. Accepting a free-form sentence would mean sending your words to a cloud language model, which would mean handing the family relationships you type to an outside service — so we have not built it, and it is not planned.

All three are built-in rule tables, with no network and no AI: fortune matches the zodiac sign you set against the day's stems and branches, while name matching and naming look at stroke-count grids, the five elements and zodiac preferences. They collect common folk readings, so treat them as a reference and a talking point, not the basis for a decision.