Skysta Privacy Policy

Effective 18 August 2026

Skysta is made by Cy Liassides. This policy describes exactly what the app does with your information. Every statement in it was checked against the app's source code rather than assembled from a template.

Questions, requests, or corrections: hello@skystaapp.com

The short version

• Your position is published only when you put a sky on the map yourself — and then it is exact. The pin on an opted-in photograph sits right where the shutter fired. The switch is off every single time you open the composer, is never remembered, and off means off: no coordinate, no place name, nothing.
• Your journal stays on this device. Photographs you keep to yourself are never uploaded, and are deliberately excluded from your iCloud backup.
• Analytics and crash reporting are off until you turn them on. They collect no account identifier, no photograph, no words you wrote, and no coordinate.
• A shared sky is permanent. It leaves the public feed after seven days and then stays on your profile and on the trusted spot's page indefinitely. Nothing deletes it but you.
• We do not sell your data, we run no advertising, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.

1. You need an account, and what that account holds

Skysta cannot be used signed out. Every screen is behind the sign-in gate.

You can sign in two ways:

• Email and password, handled by Google Firebase Authentication. The minimum password length is six characters.
• Sign in with Apple. Skysta asks Apple for your name and email address. If you choose Apple's Hide My Email, the relay address is all Skysta ever receives, and it is used exactly like any other address.

There is no email verification step and no two-factor option. An address you do not control could be used to open an account.

What is stored about you as a person:

That is the whole of it. Skysta stores no phone number, no address, no date of birth, no payment details, and no contacts.

1.1 Your byline may be part of your email address

If you sign up with email and never set a name, Skysta shows the part of your address before the @ as your display name, and publishes that string on every sky you share. Setting a name in Settings → Edit name replaces it everywhere from that moment on — but not on skies already published, which cannot be edited (see §7).

2. Location, at every level of precision

Skysta is an app about where the sun meets the horizon, so it needs to know roughly where you are. It asks for While Using the App access only, and it never requests the highest accuracy setting — every position in the app comes from a request for roughly hundred-metre accuracy.

Here is every location value the app holds, and exactly how far each one travels.

2.1 Where the published place name comes from

When a shared sky carries a place name, that name is produced by asking Apple's reverse geocoder what sits under the capture coordinate, at the moment you share. It names where the photograph was taken — not your watched place, which earlier versions published instead. Two things about it are worth knowing:

• The geocoder prefers the town ("Orem, UT"), falling back to the county or region when no town is incorporated there. If the lookup fails, the post simply carries no place name — Skysta never substitutes a guess.
• There is no way to type a place name of your own choosing. If you would rather publish nothing, leave the map switch off — the place name is published only when that switch is on.

2.2 Your capture coordinates stay on the phone unless you map that sky

Every photograph you take with Skysta records where it was taken, at full precision, so that it can surface on the page of a nearby trusted spot. That record lives in one file inside the app's own storage. It is never uploaded, it is deliberately excluded from your iCloud and device backups, and it is erased when you delete the photograph, sign out, or delete your account.

The one route from that coordinate to the network is the map switch described in §4 — and since 18 August 2026 it publishes the coordinate exactly as recorded, as the pin on that one photograph. Earlier versions rounded it to a ~5 km grid first; the current app does not, and says so beside the switch.

2.3 One thing that is backed up

Your watched place — the coordinate of the town Skysta is showing you — is stored in ordinary app preferences, which are included in your device backup. The journal is excluded from backup; this value is not.

3. Your photographs

Photographs are captured with Skysta's own camera, inside a live sunrise or sunset window. There is no import path from your photo library.

Every capture is written to the journal on your device, at high quality, in the app's own container. Skysta cannot read your photo library; the permission it holds is add-only, used when you tap Save to Photos. Choosing a profile picture uses Apple's system picker, which hands Skysta the one image you chose and never grants access to the library itself.

When you share one, the image is re-encoded from raw pixels before it is uploaded. That process discards every piece of embedded metadata the camera wrote — GPS tags, capture timestamps, camera serial numbers, lens data. The file that reaches Skysta's storage contains the picture and nothing else. The only property attached to it is the content type, image/jpeg.

4. What a shared sky publishes — the exact list

When you share a sky, the app writes one image file and one record. The record contains these fields, always:

• The photograph's identifier
• Your account identifier
• Your display name (up to 64 characters)
• Whether it was a sunrise or a sunset
• Whether it was captured inside a live light window
• The moment the shutter fired
• The moment it was published (set by the server, not your phone)
• The storage path of the image
• An unused expiry timestamp — see §6
• An empty caption field. Skysta has no caption feature; nothing you write is stored, because there is nowhere to write it. The field is sent as an empty string only because the published server rule still expects the key.

And these, only under the conditions given:

4.1 There are two controls, and they are independent

The composer has two separate location controls, and a single post can carry the results of both at once.

The spot tag appears automatically when you are within 500 metres of a trusted spot you had planned for. It publishes that spot's public name. Tap the ✕ beside it to take it off. It is not affected by the map switch.

Show on the map is a switch, off every time the composer opens, never remembered between posts. Turning it on publishes the exact capture coordinate and the name of the town it sits in.

There is no map preview in the composer. The screen shows the photograph, the audience picker, the location row and the switch — you are told in words what will be published, and you are not shown a pin before you post.

4.2 The pin, precisely

The published coordinate is the one the photograph was taken at, unrounded. This is deliberate and recent: before 18 August 2026, the value was snapped to a ~5 km grid before it left your phone. It no longer is. The composer says exactly this next to the switch — "puts this sky on the map right where you took it" — and a pin at your home is your home. Publish one only on purpose.

Posts published by earlier versions still carry their grid-rounded values; turning the switch on then never disclosed anything finer, and those posts do not change.

4.3 When a spot is tagged, the pin is the spot's coordinate

If you turn the map switch on and the post carries a trusted spot tag, the pin other people see is the trusted spot's own published coordinate rather than yours — a named public overlook, which the tag already places you within 500 metres of. Combined with the timestamp it still says you stood at a named place at a particular minute.

5. Who can see a shared sky

Every signed-in Skysta account. There is no friends list, no followers, no private audience. If it is not in your journal, it is visible to everyone who has the app.

That applies to the whole record, not just the parts Skysta chooses to draw: the security rule grants any signed-in account read access to every field of every post, and to every shared image and profile photo.

Two consequences are worth stating plainly.

Image links work without an account. Skysta asks Firebase Storage for a download link when it displays a photograph, and the link Firebase returns carries an access token that works for anyone who has it, signed in or not. Anyone who can see your photograph in the app can extract that link and give it to anyone at all.

Anyone can save or forward your photograph. Every sky in the feed — not just your own — offers Save to Photos and a Share action. Any viewer can put your photograph in their camera roll and send it anywhere.

Treat a shared sky as public. It is.

5.1 What other people cannot see

• Your email address. The document holding it is readable by you alone.
• Your journal.
• Your block list, or the fact that you blocked anyone.
• Any report you file. Reports cannot be read back by any app, including this one.
• Your online status. Skysta records when you are connected so the service knows an account is active, keyed to your account identifier, and the rule on that data permits only you to read it.

6. How long things last — and what never goes away

This is the part most privacy policies get wrong, so read it carefully.

A shared sky stays in the public Moments feed for seven days, measured from the moment it was published.

After seven days it is not deleted. It moves. It remains, indefinitely:

• on your profile, where anyone who taps your byline sees everything you have ever shared, however old; and
• on the page of the trusted spot it was tagged at, if it carries a tag, where it becomes part of that place's permanent gallery.

There is no automatic deletion anywhere in Skysta. There is no scheduled cleanup job, no server-side retention policy, and no expiry rule. The record carries a field named expiresAt, but nothing reads it and nothing acts on it. Only you can remove a shared sky, and only by deleting it.

Everything else:

• Your journal stays on your device until you delete the photograph, sign out, or delete the app.
• Your account record — email, name, profile photo — is kept until you delete your account.
• Diagnostics, if you have switched them on, follow Firebase's own retention, generally up to 14 months.
• Reports you file are kept permanently and cannot be deleted through the app by anybody, including the person who filed them.

7. You cannot edit a shared sky, and you cannot remove its location

Once a sky is published, nothing about it can be changed — not by you, not by the app, and not by any modified client. The server refuses all updates to published posts outright.

This means there is no way to take a location off a post you have already shared. The only way to remove a location is to delete the whole post, which also removes the photograph.

To delete one sky: open it, tap the ⋯ menu, choose Delete. The record goes first, then the image file. If the image file fails to delete — a dropped connection at the wrong moment — the record is gone but the image may remain reachable through the link described in §5.

8. Diagnostics and analytics — off unless you turn them on

Skysta collects no analytics and no crash reports until you switch on Settings → Privacy → Help improve Skysta. Collection starts disabled at the level of the app's own configuration, before any code runs, and stays disabled until you say otherwise. You can turn it back off at any time.

When it is off, nothing is sent, and any crash reports still queued on the device are deleted.

When it is on, this is the whole of what is collected:

• Which screens you opened, and roughly how long you spent on them (banded, not timed — "10-30 seconds", not "19 seconds").
• Whether an action succeeded or failed, and which category of failure.
• Your app version and build, that it is iOS, the major OS version, whether it is an iPhone or an iPad, which release channel the build came from, and a coarse time-of-day band.
• Crash reports.

And this is what is deliberately never attached:

• Your account identifier. The analytics user ID is explicitly set to null on every configuration pass. Diagnostics are never linked to your Skysta account.
• Your name, email, photographs, any text, or any coordinate. Those field names are on a blocklist, and every event is validated against a fixed contract before it is sent. An event that fails validation is dropped rather than trimmed.
• Skysta generates an anonymous installation identifier when you opt in, but it is used only as a local seed to decide which high-frequency events to sample. It is never sent anywhere. It is deleted when you opt out.

Firebase Performance Monitoring is switched off unconditionally, whether or not you have opted in. It is present in the app but never enabled.

What consent cannot cover: when diagnostics are on, Google generates its own app-instance identifier, and can infer a coarse region from the network address your requests arrive from. Skysta cannot prevent either, and says so in the Settings screen next to the switch.

Crash reporting changes fully on your next launch — that is how the underlying library works, and Settings says so.

8.1 The diagnostics choice belongs to the device, not the account

Your opt-in is stored on the device, not on your account. If you turn diagnostics on and then sign out, the setting stays on, and it applies to the next account signed in on that phone. Deleting your account does clear it.

9. Who else receives your data

Skysta contains no advertising libraries and no third-party tracking libraries. It does not use Apple's tracking permission because it does not track you.

Spot suggestions are not deletable through the app. If you suggest a spot, that submission — including the exact coordinate you chose and the account identity it was sent under — is retained by the review service and is not removed when you delete your account. Write to hello@skystaapp.com to have one removed.

9.1 Older shared posts still contain data this policy would not allow today

A small number of posts published by earlier versions of Skysta still carry, in the stored record, a precise metre-level coordinate and, in two cases, an email address. The current app hides both when it draws those posts — but hiding is not removing, and the underlying record is readable by any signed-in account using any client.

These records cannot be repaired from inside the app: no client is permitted to update a published post. They have to be cleaned with administrator credentials from outside the app.

10. What stays on your device and nowhere else

• Every photograph in your journal, and the coordinate of every capture.
• Your reminder schedule. Sunrise and sunset reminders are scheduled locally by iOS. Skysta sends no push notifications and operates no notification server.
• Your units, your plan, and your interface preferences.
• The draft of any spot suggestion you started but did not send.

Skysta also deliberately disables the on-device cache its database library would otherwise use. Because the feed is readable by every signed-in account, that cache would have written other people's shared locations and names into an unencrypted store on your phone and kept them after sign-out. Feed data is held in memory only.

Your journal has never left your device. There is no cloud copy of it.

11. Deleting your account

Settings → Delete account. Here is precisely what happens, in order.

1. Every sky you have shared is withdrawn — the record and the image file, in batches, until none remain.
2. If any of them cannot be removed, the deletion stops there and your account is left intact, with a message telling you how many failed. This is deliberate: an account that is gone can never remove its own posts, because the rule that permits the deletion requires the author to be signed in.
3. Your profile photo is deleted, from the device and from storage.
4. Your block list is deleted.
5. Your Apple sign-in token is revoked, when the app holds the code needed to do it — see below.
6. Your account record and your Firebase account are deleted.
7. Your journal, reminders, cached images and preferences are wiped from the device, and analytics consent and state are cleared.

If Firebase considers your session too old, it refuses the deletion and asks you to sign in again first. The app tells you so.

11.1 What account deletion does not remove

Being exact about this is more useful than being reassuring.

• Posts the app cannot read back. A small number of records written by very early versions cannot be decoded by the current app. Because it cannot see them, it cannot delete them, and it does not count them as failures — so the deletion reports success and proceeds. Once your account is gone, the rule that permits deleting a post requires an author who can never sign in again. Those records, and their images, stay readable by signed-in accounts and can only be removed with administrator credentials. Write to hello@skystaapp.com and they will be removed by hand.
• Your online-status record. The moment you were last connected remains, keyed to your former account identifier. Nothing in the deletion flow touches it, and the rule on that data means nobody can read or remove it afterwards.
• Reports you filed, and reports filed about you. These are permanent by design and contain both accounts' identifiers.
• Spot suggestions you sent (see §9).
• Other people's block lists, if they had blocked you. Those are their private records.

11.2 Signing out

Signing out ends the session and wipes the journal, cached photographs, your plan and your personal preferences from the device. It does nothing to skies you have already shared — those stay published until you delete them individually or delete your account.

11.3 By email

Write to hello@skystaapp.com for any request to access, correct, export, or delete your data — including the items above that the app cannot reach itself. Requests are answered within 30 days.

12. Children

Skysta is not directed at children under 13 and is not designed for them.

Skysta does not currently ask your age, and enforces no age floor. There is no birth-date field, no age gate, and no neutral age screen anywhere in the app. Anyone who can create an email account or use Sign in with Apple can create a Skysta account and publish a photograph to every other account on the service.

If you believe a child has created an account or published a photograph, write to hello@skystaapp.com and it will be removed.

If you are a young person using Skysta: a shared sky is visible to everyone, anyone can save it and pass it on, and it stays on your profile permanently. Leave Show on the map off — it pins the photograph exactly where you were standing — and think twice about the spot tag if the spot is somewhere you go regularly.

13. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access your personal data, correct it, delete it, receive a copy of it in a portable form, restrict or object to how it is processed, and not be discriminated against for exercising any of those rights. Write to hello@skystaapp.com.

If you are in the EEA or the UK, the legal bases Skysta relies on are:

• Consent — publishing a location or place name with a post, and diagnostics. Each is a separate, explicit choice, and each can be withdrawn: the location choice is made per photograph and is never remembered; diagnostics can be switched off at any time in Settings. Withdrawing either does not affect anything else in the app.
• Performance of a contract — running your account, storing your journal, and delivering the shared feed.
• Legitimate interests — keeping the service working, secure, and free of abuse, including the block and report tools.

You may lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.

Skysta does not sell personal information and does not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined by the California Consumer Privacy Act. Skysta has never done so.

13.1 Where your data is processed

Skysta's service providers — Google Firebase and Apple — store and process data on their own infrastructure, which may be located outside the country you live in, including in the United States. Where personal data moves from the EEA, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland to a country without an adequacy decision, the transfer takes place under those providers' published data-processing terms, which incorporate the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses. Open-Meteo receives only the rounded coordinate described in §9, carrying no identifier of any kind.

14. Security

Everything Skysta sends travels over TLS. Access to the feed requires a signed-in account, with the important exception of the image links described in §5. The database's on-disk cache is switched off so that other people's data is never written to your phone. Your journal lives in the app's private container and is excluded from your device backup.

Security rules are enforced by the server, not merely asserted by the app: the shape of every published record is validated field by field, and a coordinate can only appear on a post at all alongside the fields the map switch writes. The pin's precision is not limited server-side — an opted-in pin is exact by design, as §4.2 describes.

No service is perfectly secure. The plainest thing that can be said is this: a location you publish is readable by every signed-in Skysta account, and the photograph attached to it can be saved and forwarded by any of them. Do not publish anything you would not be comfortable being public and permanent.

15. Tracking and Apple's privacy manifest

Skysta declares no tracking and lists no tracking domains. It does not use Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework because it has nothing to ask permission for.

The app's privacy manifest declares that it collects: email address, user identifier, name, photographs, other user content, coarse location, and precise location — all for app functionality, none for tracking — plus product interaction and crash data for analytics, unlinked to your identity.

Precise location was added to the manifest on 18 August 2026, when the opt-in map pin became exact (§4.2). The declaration and the behaviour must continue to move together: if either changes, the other changes in the same release.

15.1 The website

skystaapp.com, where this policy is published, is a static website. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, loads no third-party scripts, fonts, or embedded content, and offers no forms. Skysta keeps no record of your visit. The site is served by Google's Firebase Hosting, which — like any web host — receives the requests your browser makes and processes the associated network addresses to deliver the pages; Skysta does not use that information to identify anyone. Nothing you do on the website is linked to a Skysta account.

16. Changes to this policy

If Skysta changes what it collects, who receives it, or how long it is kept, this policy will be updated and you will be told inside the app before the change takes effect. The effective date at the top always reflects the current version.

17. Contact

hello@skystaapp.com

Cy Liassides, developer of Skysta.