Privacy

Recommendations for our other apps

In the app’s settings or information area, the app can fetch up to three recommendations for our other apps. The choices depend on the app you are using, App Store availability and iOS compatibility, not on your personal data or activity inside the app. App icons load from Apple’s image servers. Opening a recommendation takes you to the App Store with a campaign label identifying the source app and placement, never a person.

We count qualified views and successful opens in aggregate. Our service stores daily counts with the source app, recommended app, placement, configuration revision and optional presentation variant. It does not store an account, advertising identifier, device identifier, persistent visitor identifier or personal profile, and it does not receive the app’s private content. These counts cannot tell us who installed an app.

The recommendation service is hosted by Supabase. Network requests necessarily expose an IP address to the hosting provider for delivery and security; our aggregate counter does not store it. See Supabase’s privacy policy. Apple processes icon requests and App Store visits under Apple’s privacy policy.

What Sunlit saves, and where

Sunlit writes a small amount of information into its own storage on your iPhone: the places you save, the horizon profiles you measure, the date and place you last looked at, your units and display settings, and whether the purchase is unlocked.

All of this private astronomy data lives inside the app's container on the device. It is not uploaded to the recommendation service or the developer. If you have iCloud Backup switched on, that container is part of your ordinary iPhone backup, exactly like any other app's data. That backup is a matter between you and Apple, and nobody else can read it.

Calculations never leave the device

The astronomical core is arithmetic, and every table it needs is inside the app: the periodic terms for the sun and the moon, the nutation series, the ozone climatology, the magnetic model and the city list. Put the phone in aeroplane mode and every number on every screen still appears. No calculation contacts a server, ours or anyone else's.

What can use a connection

These optional connections support place search, purchases, advertising and app recommendations. The first three listed below use Apple's frameworks under Apple's privacy policy. Advertising contacts Google, while recommendations contact the Supabase-hosted service and Apple's image servers as described above.

• Searching Apple Maps for a place name. Only while you are typing in the place search field, and only if a connection exists. The embedded city list is searched at the same time and needs no connection at all, so search still works offline.
• Resolving the time zone of a pin you drop on the map. The coordinate goes to Apple's geocoder. With no connection, Sunlit falls back to the time zone of your device and says so on the screen rather than guessing quietly.
• Buying, or restoring, Sunlit Pro. The App Store handles the payment.
• Loading an advert in the free version. Google's ad kit contacts Google, and only once you have consented to it. A copy with Sunlit Pro never does this at all. See Advertising in the free version.
• Recommendations for our other apps. Settings can load a source-specific list, app icons and anonymous aggregate view/open counts through the services described above.

Location

Sunlit asks for location so that it can place you at your own coordinate. The coordinate is used inside the app to compute positions, and it is written to storage only if you save that place yourself. It is never transmitted by Sunlit, to us or to anybody else.

You can refuse the permission and still use the app. Choose a place by name from the embedded city list, or drop a pin on the map, and everything else works exactly the same.

Camera

The AR view draws the paths of the sun and the moon over a live camera image, and the horizon sweep lets you trace your own skyline by aiming at it. Camera frames are used to draw that view and are then discarded. Sunlit does not record video, does not save frames, and sends no image anywhere.

What a horizon sweep saves is 36 numbers: one apparent altitude for each ten degrees of azimuth. If you refuse the camera permission, the app carries on without the camera image.

What Sunlit does not do

• No account, no email address, no password.
• No personal usage profiles or crash reporting service; recommendations use anonymous aggregate counts.
• No third party kit apart from Google's advertising kit, which the next section describes and which a copy with Sunlit Pro never starts.
• The recommendation service receives no saved places, horizons or other private astronomy data.
• Nothing you enter is shared or sold. Your places, your horizon profiles, your settings and your location are never passed to the advertising kit, and never to anybody else.

Advertising in the free version

The free version of Sunlit shows advertising. It appears as a single banner at the foot of the Data tab, below the scrolling column of figures. The Sky tab, the AR view, the Map and Settings carry no banner, and the app shows no full screen advert anywhere in it. Sunlit Pro removes the advertising entirely.

The adverts are delivered by the Google Mobile Ads SDK. The provider is Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland, for users in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, and Google LLC elsewhere. To fill an advert slot, Google receives technical data from the device such as an IP address, device and operating system characteristics and, if you allow it, an advertising identifier.

Your consent comes first. Before the advertising kit is started at all, the app shows Google's User Messaging Platform consent form, and iOS then asks its own App Tracking Transparency question. Only after that does any advert load. The legal basis is your consent, Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR, and you may withdraw it at any time with effect for the future: open the Data tab, scroll to the foot of it and choose Advertising privacy choices. Buying Sunlit Pro removes the advertising altogether, and with it the whole of this section: a copy that owns Pro starts no advertising kit, shows no consent form and asks no tracking question.

Google's own processing is described at policies.google.com/privacy and, for advertising specifically, at business.safety.google/privacy. Sunlit also uses anonymous aggregate recommendation counts. It contains no personal usage profiling or crash reporting service.

The purchase

Sunlit Pro is a single non consumable purchase handled entirely by Apple. The app asks Apple whether the Apple Account signed in on this device owns the purchase, and receives yes or no. We never see your name, your email address, your Apple Account or your payment details. Apple's privacy policy governs that transaction: apple.com/legal/privacy.

Notifications and widgets

Event notifications are worked out on the device and handed to iOS, which delivers them locally. There is no push server, and no notification ever leaves your iPhone. Widgets compute their own values on the device as well, in an extension of the same app, and refresh at event boundaries.

This website

These pages set no cookies. The pages that describe the app use Vercel Web Analytics, a cookieless measurement service of the hosting provider. It sets no identifier, stores nothing on your device and builds no profile of you. It counts page views, and it counts clicks on the App Store button together with the place that button occupies on the page and the path of the page it sat on. Nothing in it is evaluated per person, and none of it is passed on to anybody else.

The site is hosted by Vercel Inc., 440 N Barranca Avenue #4133, Covina, CA 91723, USA. Its privacy policy is at vercel.com/legal/privacy-policy.

Children

Sunlit is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect their personal data. The recommendation and hosting requests described above do not include private astronomy data. Advertising in the free version is processed by Google and runs only where the required consent has been given.

Deleting everything

Deleting the app removes its local astronomy data. The developer has no server copy of that content. Aggregate recommendation counts have no identifier with which to find or delete a person’s events; hosting providers process technical connection data as described above. A purchase stays with your Apple Account and can be restored later at no cost.

Credits and licences

The city list embedded in Sunlit is derived from GeoNames and is used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. The same credit appears inside the app, in Settings.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. This page describes the app as it is released today: should a future version process data differently, the page is updated before that version ships.

Contact

Questions about privacy go straight to a person: levin.schwab@gmx.de

Levin David Schwab, Paulinenstrasse 1/2, 71263 Weil der Stadt, Germany.