Polvio Support & Help

1. Getting Help & Contacting Support

Welcome to Polvio Support. This page answers the most common questions about using the app, your account, your subscription, our AI features, the community, the Political Compass, and your privacy. If you can't find what you need below, we're happy to help directly.

How to reach us

You can contact the Polvio support team by email at [email protected]. Please include the email address associated with your account and a clear description of your issue so we can assist you as quickly as possible.

Polvio is operated by the Polvio team. This Support page is provided for general guidance and is governed by our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which take precedence in the event of any conflict.

2. Account & Sign-In

How do I sign in?

You can create an account and sign in using Google, Apple, or an email and password. When you use Google or Apple, we verify your email address from the sign-in provider's identity token. We do not store your social provider password.

If you sign up with an email and password, your password is stored only in a securely hashed form and is never kept as plain text.

What information is on my profile?

Your profile can include a username (your @handle, up to 30 characters), an optional display name (up to 50 characters), and an optional bio (up to 160 characters). You control your display name, bio, and privacy setting, and you can edit them in the app.

Can I change my username without losing my data?

Yes. Changing your username is purely cosmetic. All of your data — bookmarks, follows, posts, replies, news activity, and settings — stays linked to a permanent internal account identifier, not to your username. Changing your @handle does not detach, orphan, or delete any of your content or relationships.

Usernames must be unique. The check is case-insensitive, so two accounts cannot differ only by capitalization.

3. Subscriptions & Billing (Polvio Pro)

How does billing work?

Polvio Pro subscriptions are sold and billed through the Apple App Store (on iOS) and Google Play Billing (on Android). Polvio itself never sees, processes, or stores your credit card or payment details — all payment processing is handled entirely by Apple or Google. We use RevenueCat to confirm your subscription status.

What plans are available?

• Monthly — an auto-renewing monthly subscription.
• Yearly — an auto-renewing annual subscription, shown with a per-month equivalent price.
• Lifetime — a one-time purchase with no renewal.

Auto-renewing plans renew automatically until you cancel them. The Lifetime option is a single one-time purchase and does not renew. Final pricing is shown in the app before you confirm your purchase.

What's the difference between Free and Pro?

The free tier includes the basic news feed (with ads), browsing politicians and sources, saving (bookmarking) articles, and participating in the community (posts and replies). Free users see ads, including native ads roughly every few articles and a full-screen ad before opening some external source links.

Polvio Pro removes ads and unlocks additional features, including the AI Agenda (daily briefing summaries), social-signal analysis on politician profiles, the personalized "For You" feed, and enhanced notifications for the politicians you follow.

How do I cancel or manage my subscription?

Auto-renewing subscriptions are managed and cancelled through your store account, not inside Polvio. On iOS, manage and cancel in your App Store settings; on Android, in your Google Play subscription settings. Your subscription will keep renewing until you cancel it there. Cancelling stops future renewals; the Lifetime purchase is one-time and has nothing to cancel.

I switched devices — how do I restore my purchase?

Use the "Restore" option on the Polvio Pro screen to restore a previous purchase on a new device. The app will reconfirm your active subscription. You can also use the in-app subscription management area to view your status, request a refund, or contact support without leaving the app.

Refunds for store purchases are handled according to the policies of the Apple App Store or Google Play.

4. The AI News Briefing & AI-Generated Summaries

What is the AI briefing?

Polvio aggregates news from third-party RSS sources and uses AI to generate summaries. This includes daily/weekly agenda summaries (a Polvio Pro feature) and daily trending summaries, which merge coverage of the same event from multiple outlets into a single readable summary. "Trending Now" clusters are generated automatically by grouping related articles and scoring them by engagement and freshness.

Important: AI summaries may be inaccurate

Please keep the following in mind when reading AI-generated content in Polvio:

• News is aggregated from third-party publishers. The accuracy of the underlying reporting depends on those original sources, not on Polvio.
• Summaries are produced by large language models, which can misinterpret or get details wrong. No human fact-checking is applied before summaries are shown.
• "Trending Now" topics are generated automatically by software (clustering plus engagement scoring) and are not editorially curated or reviewed by a person before display.
• Topic and category labels are assigned automatically and may occasionally be wrong for edge cases.
• Trending clusters rebuild on a regular cycle, so brand-new stories may not appear immediately.
• When a summary cannot be generated fully, the app may fall back to showing raw headlines instead.

Always treat AI summaries as a convenient starting point, and refer to the original source articles for important decisions.

5. Community: Posts, Follows & Private Accounts

What can I do in the community?

You can create text posts (up to 1,000 characters) and optionally attach a news story to a post. You can reply to posts (replies are also up to 1,000 characters and are not nested), and you can like or unlike both posts and replies. Posts and replies show the author, the text, like and reply counts, and a timestamp. Individual likes are shown only as counts; we do not expose who liked a post or reply.

How do follows and follow requests work?

You can follow and unfollow other users. If you follow a public account, the follow takes effect immediately. If you follow a private account, your request stays pending until that account's owner approves it.

If you have a private account, incoming follow requests appear on your own profile, where you can see each requester and confirm or reject them. You'll receive in-app notifications for events such as a new follow request and when one of your requests is accepted.

How do I make my account private?

You can switch your account between public and private using the privacy setting in your profile. The difference is:

• Public account: your posts, replies, and your followers/following lists are visible to other signed-in users, and new followers are accepted automatically.
• Private account: your posts and your followers/following lists are visible only to you and to followers you have approved. People who don't follow you will see a locked state (for example, "Private account. Follow to see posts" or "Follow request pending"), and new follows require your approval.

Deleting your own posts and replies

You can delete your own posts and your own replies at any time. Deleted content is removed from feeds and detail views.

6. The Political Compass

What is the Political Compass?

The Political Compass is an optional feature that helps personalize your news. During onboarding you can choose countries and topics of interest, set three sliders (economic, social-policy, and foreign-policy positioning), and select a few values. Polvio uses these choices to filter and rank your personalized "For You" feed and to estimate how closely you match individual politicians.

Is this sensitive data?

Yes. Your Political Compass reflects your political opinions, which are treated as sensitive (special-category) personal data under data-protection laws such as the GDPR and Türkiye's KVKK. Because of this, we intend for the Political Compass to be processed on the basis of your consent. The exact consent mechanism and legal basis are to be confirmed with legal counsel; please refer to our Privacy Policy for the controlling statement.

Providing this information is optional — you can skip the Political Compass entirely during onboarding and continue to use Polvio without it. We collect only a small, fixed set of fields and do not otherwise track your political opinions through your behavior.

How do I change, reset, or withdraw my Political Compass?

• Edit: open Settings and go to Political Compass to change any field. Your changes are saved automatically.
• Reset / withdraw: use "Restart from the beginning" at the bottom of the Political Compass settings to permanently delete your political profile. You'll be asked to confirm, and you can then continue using Polvio without a profile.
• Delete entirely: deleting your account also permanently removes your Political Compass along with the rest of your data.

If you request a copy of your data (see the next section), your Political Compass is included in the export.

7. Privacy & Your Data

What data does Polvio store about me?

Depending on how you use the app, Polvio stores account and profile details, your preferences (such as language, countries of interest, and notification settings), device and push-notification information, your activity (such as news clicks, bookmarks, followed politicians, comments, and likes), your community content, and your optional Political Compass. Our Privacy Policy describes these categories in full. We do not use third-party advertising-analytics tracking SDKs; our interaction tracking is internal to Polvio.

Who helps us run the service?

Polvio relies on certain third-party providers to operate, such as sign-in providers (Google and Apple), the store/subscription layer (Apple, Google, and RevenueCat), push-notification delivery, email delivery, error monitoring, and an AI provider used to generate summaries. The complete and authoritative list of processors is Google (Google Sign-In; the Gemini API for AI summaries; AdMob advertising; Firebase Cloud Messaging for push notifications; Google Play billing), Apple (Sign in with Apple; App Store billing), RevenueCat (subscription management), Resend (transactional email), and Sentry (error reporting) — with the application and database hosted on servers located in Europe, and confirmed in our Privacy Policy.

Can I download a copy of my data?

Yes. In Settings, under the privacy and data area, choose "Download data." Polvio prepares your data in the background and emails you a secure, single-use download link. For your security, the link expires after a limited time (and after it is used). You can make one export request per hour.

How do I delete my account, and what does that remove?

To delete your account, open Settings and select "Delete Account." You'll be asked to confirm (including typing a confirmation phrase). If you signed up with an email and password, you'll also confirm your password.

Account deletion is permanent and cannot be undone. It removes your user record and your associated data, including your follows, bookmarks, push tokens, notification preferences, blocked-source list, news-click history, Political Compass, interest profile, and your news comments.

Please note one exception: aggregate, anonymous engagement counts (for example, total view counts on a politician or article) are kept in a non-identifying, summarized form and are not tied to you after deletion. Your individual contributions to those totals are removed, but the anonymized totals themselves remain. The specific retention handling of any residual aggregate data is up to 90 days.

Questions about your data, the minimum age of 16 required to use Polvio, or the applicable law (the laws of Turkey, with the courts of Istanbul having jurisdiction) should be directed to [email protected] and are addressed in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

8. Reporting a Problem or Abusive Content

Reporting news comments

On news comments, you can use the in-app report option to flag content. Available reasons include spam, harassment, hate speech, misinformation, and other. Reported news comments are reviewed and may be dismissed or removed by an administrator.

Community posts and other users

Please note: the current version of Polvio does not yet include in-app tools to report community posts, replies, or other users' profiles, and it does not include a feature to block another user. We know these are important, and we are working to add them.

In the meantime, if you encounter an abusive community post or user, or any other problem, please email [email protected] with details (such as the username and a description or screenshot). Administrators can remove community posts that violate our rules. As a reminder, you can always delete your own posts and replies, and you can make your account private to control who can see and interact with your content.

Other issues

For bugs, billing questions, or anything else not covered here, contact us at [email protected]. We'll do our best to help.