Skysta Terms of Use

Last updated: 17 August 2026

These terms are an agreement between you and Cy Liassides ("Skysta", "we", "us") about your use of the Skysta app. By creating an account you accept them. If you do not accept them, please do not use Skysta.

We have tried to write these in plain words. Where a sentence describes what the app does, it describes what the app actually does today.

1. Who can use Skysta

You must be at least 13 years old to use Skysta. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use Skysta only with a parent or guardian's permission, and they accept these terms alongside you.

We do not ask your age and we cannot verify it. That does not make the rule optional. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13, we will remove it.

Do not use Skysta if we have previously terminated your account, or if the law where you live forbids it.

2. Your account

Skysta requires an account. You can create one with Sign in with Apple or with an email address and a password. Accounts are handled by Firebase Authentication, a Google service.

• Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for everything done under your account.
• If you forget your password, Skysta can email you a reset link.
• Skysta does not verify that an email address belongs to you, and it does not offer two-factor authentication. Use an address you control, and a password you do not use elsewhere.
• Tell us at hello@skystaapp.com if you think someone else is using your account.

The name you set in Settings is published on every sky you share, and so is the profile picture you choose. Both are visible to every Skysta account. Do not use a name that impersonates someone else.

3. What Skysta costs, and what you may do with it

Skysta is free. There is nothing to buy inside it and no subscription. If that ever changes, we will tell you before it does.

We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use Skysta on devices you own or control, for your own non-commercial use. You may not:

• copy, modify, decompile, or reverse-engineer the app, except where the law says you may;
• rent, sell, sublicense, or redistribute it;
• collect, scrape, or bulk-download other people's photographs, names, or posts, by any means, automated or not;
• use another client, script, or tool to interact with Skysta's servers;
• try to defeat the app's limits, its rules, or its moderation.

Skysta's own name, its design, its writing, its Sky Score, and its curated spot data belong to us.

4. Forecasts are forecasts

Skysta gives sunrise and sunset times, a 0–100 Sky Score, and curated public viewing spots.

Times are computed from astronomical geometry and are accurate for the coordinate you are watching. They describe where the sun is — not what you can see from where you stand. Skysta does not model the terrain, buildings, ridges, or trees in front of you, so the sun may disappear behind a hill well before the time Skysta shows.

The Sky Score is a prediction, not a fact. It is built from weather forecasts and an air-quality reading, and forecasts are wrong sometimes. A high score is not a promise of a beautiful sunset, and a low one is not a promise of a dull one. Do not rely on it for anything that matters.

Drive times and "leave by" times are estimates from Apple's routing service. They are not a schedule, and they do not know about your traffic, your car, or the road tonight. Never drive faster than the law or conditions allow in order to make one.

Air-quality data comes from a third party and can be missing, late, or wrong. When Skysta does not have a reading, it shows nothing rather than a guess.

5. Going outside is your responsibility

Trusted spots are curated for the view. We make a real effort to verify their coordinates and public access, but we do not inspect them for safety and we do not control them. Conditions change, land changes hands, gates close, and roads wash out.

Dawn and dusk are the two hardest hours to be outdoors in an unfamiliar place. Before you travel:

• check that the place is open to the public and that you are allowed to be there at that hour;
• consider the terrain, the drop-offs, the weather, the cold, and the drive;
• tell someone where you are going;
• do not trespass, do not climb what you should not climb, and do not park where you should not park.

You are responsible for your own safety and for obeying the law. Do not use Skysta while driving. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for what happens to you at a place you went to because of this app.

6. Your photographs

6.1 They stay yours

The photographs you take with Skysta are yours. We claim no ownership of them.

Every photograph in Skysta is taken with Skysta's own camera. The app cannot import a picture from your photo library into a sky — there is no path for it. The only image you choose from your library is your profile picture.

6.2 Your journal is private

A capture you keep in your Journal stays in Skysta's own storage on your phone. It is not uploaded, not backed up to iCloud, and not readable by us or by anyone else. Signing out or deleting your account erases it from the device.

6.3 The licence you grant when you share

When you choose to share a sky, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, and display that photograph, together with your display name, within Skysta, so that the app can show it to other Skysta users. That is the whole purpose of the licence.

The licence lasts as long as the post does. It ends when you delete the post, or when your account is deleted, except for copies already sitting in routine backups, which age out on their own.

We will not use your photographs in advertising or marketing without asking you first.

You promise us that: the photograph is yours; sharing it infringes nobody's rights; and it does not show another person in a way they have not agreed to.

6.4 Everyone signed in can see a shared sky

There is no friends-only audience in Skysta. A shared sky is visible to every signed-in Skysta account, and so is the profile picture and name beside it. Blocking someone does not undo a share.

6.5 What you cannot take back

Please read this part before you share anything.

• A published sky cannot be edited. Not its photograph, not its place, not its spot tag. The servers refuse every change. The only way to alter a shared sky is to delete the whole post, which you can do at any time from the ⋯ menu on the post.
• Anyone who can see your sky can keep it. Skysta offers Save to Photos and Share on every post, not only your own. Someone can put your photograph in their camera roll or send it to another app, and we cannot prevent that or get it back.
• The image address works without an account. Shared photographs are served from a web address that anyone holding the link can open, whether or not they use Skysta. Treat anything you share as capable of leaving the app.

6.6 A shared sky does not expire

A shared sky is in the Moments feed for 7 days. After that it is not deleted — it moves. It stays:

• on your profile, where any signed-in account that taps your name can see your whole archive, oldest to newest; and
• on the page of the trusted spot it was tagged to, if it carries a tag, where it stays as a record of what the light does there.

Nothing is removed automatically, ever. A shared sky is permanent until you delete it. Share accordingly.

7. Location on a shared sky

Skysta publishes where you were standing only if you put that sky on the map yourself — and then it publishes it exactly. Two separate controls decide what a shared sky says about where it was taken, and they work independently — a post can carry both.

The spot tag. If you are within about 500 metres of a trusted spot you planned for, Skysta attaches that spot's name to the sky. This is on by default when you are in range, and you remove it by tapping the ✕ on the tag in the share screen. A tag names a public overlook — and it tells everyone you were within a few hundred metres of it.

"Show on the map." This is off every single time and is never remembered between posts. Leave it off and your sky carries no coordinate and no place name at all. Turn it on and the post carries:

• the exact coordinate the photograph was taken at — the pin sits right where you stood, the way the share screen says it will. A pin at your home is your home: turn this on only for photographs taken somewhere you are happy to name; and
• the name of the town the photograph was taken in, from Apple's reverse-geocoding of that same coordinate. If the lookup fails, the post carries no place name.

If you keep a spot tag and also turn on the map, the pin is drawn at the trusted spot itself — a named, public place the tag already puts you within 500 metres of — rather than at your own coordinate. If you do not want either disclosure, remove the spot tag, turn the map off, or both.

Please think before adding either one to a photograph taken somewhere you are regularly — particularly if you are under 18.

There is no way to strip a location off a sky you have already shared. As in §6.5, the only remedy is to delete the post. Full detail of what is collected and sent is in our Privacy Policy.

8. Spot suggestions

If you suggest a viewing spot, you send us the name you gave it, its town and state, a coordinate you picked on the map, whether it is best for sunrise or sunset, and any reason and parking note you wrote. You confirm the place is open to the public and that you are not sending us private property, a restricted area, or somewhere unsafe.

You grant us a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use, edit, and publish that information in Skysta, with no obligation to publish it, to credit you, or to pay you. We may verify, rewrite, move, or reject any suggestion.

Suggestions cannot be withdrawn from inside the app. Email hello@skystaapp.com and we will remove yours.

9. Community rules

Do not post, and do not use Skysta to do, any of the following:

• anything unlawful, hateful, harassing, threatening, or defamatory;
• sexual content of any kind, and absolutely nothing involving the sexual exploitation of a child;
• graphic violence, gore, or content glorifying self-harm;
• someone else's photograph presented as your own;
• a photograph that identifies another person who has not agreed to it;
• another person's home, workplace, location, or personal information;
• spam, scams, advertising, or impersonation of any person or organisation;
• anything intended to identify, follow, locate, or intimidate another user.

Skysta is a place for photographs of the sky. Content that has nothing to do with that may be removed even if it breaks no other rule.

There is no tolerance for objectionable content or abusive users on Skysta.

10. Reporting, blocking, and what we do about it

Reporting. Every shared sky that is not yours has a Report this sky option in its ⋯ menu. Choose a reason and send — it takes one tap and a confirmation. Reports are private: the person who posted is never told who reported them, and no one using the app can read the report queue.

Blocking. The same menu has Block. Blocking removes that person's skies from your Moments feed and from the trusted-spot galleries, on every device you sign in to. You can see everyone you have blocked, and unblock them, in Settings → Blocked.

Our commitment. We review every report and we act on reports of objectionable content within 24 hours. Acting means removing the content, and — where the content or the behaviour warrants it — suspending or permanently terminating the account that posted it. We may do this without notice.

You can also reach a human directly at hello@skystaapp.com about anything you have seen in Skysta, whether or not you filed a report. If a photograph of you, or one you own, has been posted without your permission, email us and we will take it down.

We are not obliged to monitor content, and we cannot promise to catch everything before you see it — but a report always reaches us, and we always answer it.

11. Ending it

You can leave at any time. Settings → Delete account removes your account and, before it does, deletes every sky you have shared and your profile picture. If any of your shared skies cannot be removed, the app stops and tells you rather than deleting your account and leaving your photographs behind. Deletion cannot be undone.

If anything of yours is still visible after you delete your account, email hello@skystaapp.com and we will remove it by hand.

Deleting your account does not erase records we have to keep: reports filed about a post, and reports you filed about others, are retained so that moderation decisions remain reviewable.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you break these terms, if the law requires it, or if we stop operating Skysta. If we shut the service down we will give you reasonable notice so you can save what you want to keep. Sections 3, 6.3, 8, 12, 13 and 15 survive the end of this agreement.

12. Other people's services

Skysta relies on services we do not run, and your use of Skysta means data reaches them as described in our Privacy Policy:

• Apple — Sign in with Apple, WeatherKit for forecasts, MapKit for maps, search, and routing.
• Google Firebase — authentication, the database and storage that hold shared skies, presence, and (only if you switch it on) analytics and crash reporting.
• Open-Meteo — the air-quality reading behind the haze part of the Sky Score, using Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service data.

These services have their own terms and their own privacy policies. We are not responsible for them, for their accuracy, or for their availability, and an outage at any of them can stop parts of Skysta from working.

13. Disclaimers and limits on liability

Skysta is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the app will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, error-free, or accurate, or that any forecast, score, time, route, or spot detail is correct.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost data, or personal injury, arising out of or relating to your use of Skysta — including any journey you make, any place you go, and anything another user posts. Our total liability for any and all claims is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim (which, for a free app, is US$0) or US$50.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including — in some places — liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you. If you are a consumer, you keep every protection the mandatory law of your country gives you.

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless against claims, damages, and reasonable legal costs arising from content you post, from your use of Skysta, or from your breach of these terms.

14. Apple

Skysta is distributed through the App Store. These terms are between you and us, not Apple. Apple has no obligation to provide any support for Skysta and is not responsible for any claim relating to it, including product liability, regulatory compliance, or intellectual-property claims. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms and may enforce them against you.

You confirm that you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo, and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Utah, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. You and we agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in Utah. If you are a consumer, you keep the protections and the courts of the country where you live.

If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects your rights, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect, and the date at the top of this page will change. Continuing to use Skysta after that means you accept the new terms. If you do not, delete your account.

17. Contact

hello@skystaapp.com

Skysta — Cy Liassides