DiningStar — Terms of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of the DiningStar mobile application (the "App"), published by Mellivo OÜ (Registry Code 17522398, Sepapaja 6, 15551 Tallinn, Estonia). By installing or using the App you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the App.

1. What DiningStar Is

DiningStar is an independent restaurant guide for İstanbul. It lists restaurants by category, shows where they are, and opens each restaurant's own digital or QR menu inside the App.

DiningStar is not a reservation service, a food delivery service, or a payment service. We do not take bookings, take orders, handle payments, or act as an agent for any restaurant. Where a restaurant offers online reservation, the App simply opens that restaurant's own reservation page.

2. No Affiliation with Listed Restaurants or Guides

Mellivo OÜ is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any restaurant listed in the App. Restaurant names, logos and menus are the property of their respective owners and are shown for identification and reference only.

DiningStar records publicly announced recognitions — such as MICHELIN Guide distinctions, Gault&Millau ratings, İncili Gastronomi Rehberi entries, OAD and La Liste rankings — as factual descriptions of a restaurant. MICHELIN, Gault&Millau and the other guides named are trademarks of their respective owners. DiningStar is not affiliated with, authorised by, or endorsed by any of them, and it does not reproduce their editorial content.

3. Accuracy — Please Read

Restaurant information changes constantly. Menus, prices, opening hours, addresses and whether a restaurant is open at all can change without notice.

DiningStar deliberately links to each restaurant's own menu instead of copying it, so that you see what the restaurant itself publishes. Even so, a link can break, a restaurant can close, and a menu can be out of date. The App is provided for guidance only. Always confirm with the restaurant directly before travelling, ordering, or relying on a price or a dietary or allergen detail.

We make no warranty that any listing, menu, price, distinction or location is complete, current or error-free.

4. Third-Party Content

When you open a menu, your device connects directly to a website operated by the restaurant or its menu provider. That content is not ours, we do not control it, and we are not responsible for it — including its accuracy, its availability, its security, or anything it may ask of you. Those sites' own terms and privacy policies apply to your visit.

Do not enter payment details, passwords or other sensitive information into a third-party page reached from the App unless you have satisfied yourself that it is legitimate.

5. Accounts

The App works fully without an account. You may optionally create one from the Profile tab to keep favourites separate on a shared device. Accounts are stored only on your device; we operate no account server and cannot recover an account, a password, or any favourites for you.

You may delete your account at any time from the Profile tab. Deletion removes the account and ends your sessions; contribution photos are erased on the schedule set out in the Privacy Policy. Restaurant information already published in the catalogue stays there, because it is public business information and not personal data about you.

6. Contributions (QR Menus and Reports)

Signed-in users can photograph a restaurant's QR menu to suggest it for the catalogue, and can report a problem with an existing listing. Contributing is voluntary, unpaid, and gives you no ownership of or claim on the catalogue.

What you promise when you contribute. That the photograph is one you took yourself, of a QR code publicly displayed at a restaurant; that you are entitled to submit it; that it contains no other person's face or personal data, no confidential or unlawful material, and nothing obscene; and that you are not trying to mislead the review — for example by passing off an unrelated page, an advertisement, or a fabricated menu as a restaurant menu.

Limits. At most 2 QR submissions and 2 reports may be awaiting review at any one time. The limit is applied on our servers.

Review. Every contribution is reviewed automatically before anything is published; see section 9 of the Privacy Policy. We decide what enters the catalogue. We are under no obligation to publish a submission, to publish it unchanged, or to give reasons beyond the short outcome shown in the Profile tab.

Misuse. If a contribution breaks these rules, we may reject it, flag your account and withdraw your ability to contribute. Repeated or deliberate misuse may lead to your account being closed. You accept this when you create an account, and you can contest any decision at studio@mellivoai.com, where a person will review it.

Licence. You keep any rights you have in your photograph. You grant Mellivo OÜ a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce and process it for the purpose of reviewing the submission, operating and defending the service, and to use the factual restaurant information derived from it (name, district, cuisine, menu address) in the catalogue without restriction. Facts are not protected by copyright; we do not publish your photograph.

7. Advertising

DiningStar is free to download and use, and is funded by advertising served through Google AdMob. You will see a banner on the main screens and an occasional full-screen ad when opening a restaurant's menu.

Where the law requires it, you are asked whether you consent to personalised ads. Declining does not restrict the App in any way — the ads are simply not personalised. You can change your choice at any time from the Profile tab.

Advertisements are supplied by third parties. We do not choose, endorse or vet individual advertisers, and an ad appearing in the App is not a recommendation. Restaurants in our catalogue are selected on their own merits; no restaurant can pay to be listed, ranked higher, or shown differently.

You may not interfere with the ads — including blocking, obscuring, automating or artificially inflating impressions or clicks. Doing so may lead to your account being closed.

8. Acceptable Use

You agree not to: use the App unlawfully; submit contributions in breach of the section above; attempt to reverse engineer, decompile or tamper with it; scrape, extract or redistribute the restaurant dataset for a competing product or any commercial purpose; interfere with its operation; or use it in a way that harms Mellivo OÜ, the listed restaurants, or other users.

9. Intellectual Property

The App, its design, its code and the compiled arrangement of its restaurant dataset are owned by Mellivo OÜ and protected by law. You receive a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the App for your own personal, non-commercial purposes. Underlying facts — that a restaurant exists, where it is, that a guide recognised it — are not claimed as our property.

10. Data Sources and Attribution

Restaurant names, coordinates and district labels in the catalogue are derived from the Foursquare Open Source Places dataset, which is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Menu links, Instagram accounts, reservation pages and guide records are collected and verified by us from the restaurants' own websites and from published guides.

The Apache License requires that we preserve Foursquare's notice in full. It is reproduced here verbatim:

© 2025 Foursquare Labs, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Foursquare OS Places dataset (the “Data”) is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"). You may not use, modify, or distribute the Data except in compliance with the License.

As set forth more fully in the License, if you use, modify, or distribute the Data, you must:

• provide recipients with a copy of the License.
• if applicable, include prominent notices to the extent you’ve changed the Data.
• preserve attribution to Foursquare, including preserving the full content of this NOTICE.txt file.

To ensure appropriate attribution to Foursquare, we recommend the following:

• if using/distributing the Data in flat file form as-is or after making changes/modifications: include this NOTICE.txt file, which may be modified to include an additional notice of your changes/modifications, if any.
• if using/distributing the Data in API form as-is or after making changes/modifications: include a copy of the content from this NOTICE.txt file prominently in your developer documentation for such API, which may be modified to include an additional notice of your changes/modifications, if any.

You may obtain a copy of the License at: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, the Data distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

We also encourage you to join our Placemaker community (https://opensource.foursquare.com/placemaker/)—where you can contribute and provide suggestions to improve the accuracy of the Data for future releases for yourself and others.

Changes we made to the Data. We select only food-and-drink venues in Türkiye, verify that each has a reachable menu, derive the district label from the dataset's own address fields, and add our own fields — menu link, menu format, Instagram, reservation page and guide records. Venues that fail verification are not published.

11. Price and Availability of the App

DiningStar is distributed through the Apple App Store and Google Play, and your use is also subject to those stores' terms. We may change, suspend or discontinue the App, or any part of it, at any time.

12. Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability

The App is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind to the fullest extent permitted by law. We are not liable for any loss arising from reliance on information in the App — including a journey made to a closed restaurant, a price that has changed, an allergen or dietary detail that was inaccurate, or content on a third-party site.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Where you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

13. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms. The "Last updated" date above shows when. Continuing to use the App after a change means you accept the updated Terms.

14. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Estonia, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If you are a consumer resident in the European Union or Türkiye, you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer rules of your country of residence.

15. Contact

Mellivo OÜ · Registry Code 17522398
Sepapaja 6, 15551 Tallinn, Estonia
E-mail: studio@mellivoai.com

See also our DiningStar Privacy Policy and Account & Data Deletion page.