Who we are
Abide in Christ (“Abide”, “we”, “our”) is a subscription-based church management and devotional app for Telugu-speaking churches in India. Abide is built and operated by Vivaha Info OPC Private Limited, a One Person Company registered in India, with its registered office at Samalkot, Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, India. The app and this site are operated from India. Contact us at support@abideinchrist.app for any privacy question.
Information we collect
We collect only what is needed to run the church features you use, confirm who you are, and process your church’s subscription. Nothing is sold or shared for advertising.
1. Account & identity
- Google account basics(name, email address, profile photo, Google account ID) when you sign in with “Continue with Google”. Google Sign-In is the only way to sign in to Abide — there is no password, and no phone-only sign-in. We ask Google for only your basic profile, email address, and account ID (the default “profile, email, openid” scopes) — nothing more. We never read your Gmail, Drive, Calendar, or any other Google service.
- Phone number.After you sign in, we verify your phone number with a one-time password (OTP) delivered over WhatsApp by our messaging partner, MSG91. If your church’s pastor or admin has already added you to the member directory using this phone number, signing in with Google links you to that existing record automatically. If the number is already linked to a differentGoogle account, we do not link automatically — we flag it for your church’s pastor to resolve, so one family member cannot accidentally take over another’s record on a shared phone.
- Date of birth— required at signup, used only to confirm you are 18 or older. See “Age requirement” below.
- Gender and marital status— optional, used only to complete your member profile, and visible only to you and your church’s pastor and admins.
- Device identifier (a randomly generated UUID stored on the device) so we can recognise the device on re-launch.
2. Church & member data entered by pastors and admins
When a pastor or admin adds members, events, hymn favourites, sermons, prayer requests, appointments, or cottage-prayer requests, those records are stored against your church. Sensitive fields such as a member’s address, date of birth, marital status, or family relationships are visible only to that church’s pastor and admins.
Baptism records— candidate name, baptism date, type, officiant, location, notes, and an optional photo — are entered by church staff only. A member cannot submit their own baptism record; it is administered by the church, the same way a paper baptism register would be.
3. Church financial records
A church’s pastor or admin can record income, expenses, budgets, and categories inside the app. Some entries are tied to a named member. These records are separate from the subscription payments described below — they are the church’s own giving and expense records, not payments to Vivaha Info.
Financial records are visible only to that church’s pastor and admins, who can export them as CSV or JSON. In this version of the app, ordinary members do not see a giving or payment screen.
4. Your personal notes
Notes you write for yourself inside the app — such as sermon or Bible-study notes — are private to you. They are never visible to other members, pastors, or admins, and are never included in any church-level data export.
5. Voice input
The Bible Assistant search and sermon-note dictation features use your phone’s speech recognition to convert your voice to text. For Telugu, on-device recognition is usually unavailable, so your phone sends the audio to Google’s speech recognition service to produce the transcript. Only the resulting textreaches Abide’s servers — we never receive, store, or upload the audio itself. Microphone access is requested only when you use these two features.
6. Optional features that need permission
- Push notifications use an Expo push token (a device identifier assigned by our push-delivery provider) for reminders and church announcements. You can turn this off in your phone settings.
- Photos only when you choose a profile photo or church logo from your device gallery. The app does not request camera or location access.
7. Diagnostics and devices
We use Firebase Crashlytics to receive anonymous crash reports. These contain a stack trace, the OS version, and the app version — never your messages, prayers, notes, or member records, and never linked to your identity.
We also record your device model and OS version to show you the “Devices” list under Settings, where you can sign a device out remotely if it’s lost.
What we do not collect
- Location.Abide does not request location permission. Searching for a nearby church or a pincode is a text search against our own church directory — the only coordinates involved belong to the matched church, never to your device.
- Contacts.The member directory lives in our database. We never read your phone’s contacts.
- Calendar.Church events live in our database. We never read your phone’s calendar.
- Advertising ID. Abide has no advertising SDK.
- Behavioural analytics. Abide has no analytics SDK tracking how you use the app.
- Health or fitness data.
- Religious belief as a form field. We never ask you to declare a religious belief.
- Payment instrument details.See “Payments and subscriptions” below.
How we use your data
- To sign you in and keep you signed in on your device.
- To sync your church data across the pastor’s and members’ devices.
- To send you the notifications you have opted in to.
- To process your church’s subscription and keep its billing status up to date.
- To diagnose crashes and improve reliability.
- To meet legal obligations when required.
We do not sell your data, share it with advertisers, or use it to train any third-party AI model.
Payments and subscriptions
Abide is offered on a paid subscription basis. Subscriptions are purchased by the church — not by individual members — on the web.
- Payments are processed by Razorpay. We do not collect or store card numbers, UPI IDs, or any other payment instrument details. Razorpay handles that information directly, under its own privacy policy.
- We store only the subscription status, plan, invoice reference, and billing contact for the church.
- Payment links may be sent to the church’s billing contact over WhatsApp, via MSG91.
Who processes your data on our behalf
We work with the following named service providers:
- Google— Google Sign-In (authentication) and Firebase Crashlytics (crash diagnostics).
- Expo(the Expo Push Service, by 650 Industries, Inc.) — when you enable notifications, we send your device push token and the notification content to Expo, which relays the notification to the platform push service for delivery: Google Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android, or the Apple Push Notification service on iOS.
- MSG91— delivery of WhatsApp OTPs and other transactional messages (such as payment links).
- Razorpay— payment processing for church subscriptions.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)— cloud hosting, in the Mumbai (India) region.
Each provider receives only the minimum data needed to perform its task, and each is governed by its own privacy policy.
Where your data lives
Personal data is stored on Amazon Web Services infrastructure in the Mumbai (India) region. AWS encrypts stored data at rest, and all data is encrypted in transit over HTTPS/TLS 1.2+. A local offline copy of your data is kept inside the app’s private, sandboxed storage on your device.
How long we keep it
- Account data — until you delete your account or your church removes you.
- Crash logs — 90 days, then automatically deleted.
- Audit logs (who changed what inside the church) — 12 months, used only by the pastor / admin of that church.
- Subscription and invoice records — 8 years, as required by Indian tax and company law.
Who is responsible for your data
- For your own account data — your Google account basics, phone number, and your own profile — Vivaha Info OPC Private Limited is the data fiduciary.
- For church and member records entered by a pastor or admin, the church is the data fiduciary, and Vivaha Info OPC Private Limited acts as a data processor on the church’s instructions.
Legal basis and consent
We process personal data on the basis of consent given at signup, and for the legitimate uses permitted under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act). Consent notices are available in English and Telugu, shown in whichever language you have chosen for the app.
You can withdraw your consent at any time by deleting your account. Withdrawing consent means you will lose access to the app. It does not affect the lawfulness of anything we did with your data before you withdrew consent.
Your rights
You can at any time:
- View your data inside the app under Settings → Profile.
- Export your church’s financial records as CSV or JSON (Pastor / Admin only) from the Finance section of the app. For a copy of any other church or account data, email support.
- Request deletion of your account by emailing support@abideinchrist.app or by following the steps on our Delete Account page. We respond within 7 days and complete deletion within 30 days.
- Withdraw notification permission from your phone settings without losing access to the rest of the app.
- Ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data by emailing support.
- Nominate another person to exercise your rights on your behalf in the event of your death or incapacity, by emailing support with their details.
- Raise a grievance and have it addressed — see “Grievance Officer” below.
Age requirement and children’s records
App accounts are for users aged 18 and above. Date of birth is required when you sign up, and the 18-and-above minimum is checked on our servers every time an account is created — not only inside the app — so it cannot be bypassed.
However, a church’s member directory may contain records of children and young people, entered by the pastor or admin as part of ordinary church administration. In that case, the church is responsible for obtaining appropriate consent from a parent or guardian before entering a child’s details. Vivaha Info OPC Private Limited acts only as a data processor for those records, on the church’s behalf.
Such records are visible only to that church’s pastor and admins. We do not use children’s data for tracking, profiling, or targeted advertising of any kind.
Security
All data in transit is sent over HTTPS / TLS 1.2+. Access and refresh tokens are both stored in the device’s secure keystore (Android Keystore / iOS Keychain). Abide is passwordless: no password is ever stored, anywhere. You sign in with Google Sign-In and we verify your phone number with a WhatsApp OTP.
If you set an app-unlock MPIN, it is checked by our servers and never stored in plain text on your device.
Grievance Officer
Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, we have appointed a Grievance Officer for Vivaha Info OPC Private Limited:
- Name: Vijayasanthi Kilaparthi, Director
- Email: support@abideinchrist.app
- Registered office: Samalkot, Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, India
We acknowledge grievances within 7 days and aim to resolve them within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may escalate your complaint to the Data Protection Board of India.
Changes to this policy
We will update this page if the way we handle data changes. The effective date at the top will be updated and material changes will be announced inside the app at least 7 days before they take effect.
Contact
Vivaha Info OPC Private Limited
Registered office: Samalkot, Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, India
Email: support@abideinchrist.app
Grievance Officer: Vijayasanthi Kilaparthi, Director