Skysta Terms of Use, in full

1. Who can use Skysta

You must be 13 years of age or older to use Skysta. By creating an account you confirm that you are. This is a condition of the agreement and it binds you whether or not we can test it.

We do not ask your age and we do not check it. There is no age question in the app, nothing that estimates how old you are, and no identity check of any kind. We are telling you that rather than letting the rule imply a gate that does not exist. Earlier versions of Skysta did ask for a birth month and year, on the phone, and never stored or sent the answer. That question has been removed entirely, along with the two yes-or-no values it left behind on the device.

If we learn that an account belongs to somebody under 13, we will remove it and everything it has posted. If you are a parent or guardian and you believe your child has an account, write to hello@skystaapp.com and we will remove it and tell you when it is done. Our Privacy Policy at §12 sets out the same thing from the data side, including that Skysta is not directed to children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from them.

Email verification is a separate thing. It proves somebody can read messages sent to an address. It is not an age check.

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

The Skysta app is offered only in the United States. These terms are written for United States law. We do not offer the app in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or anywhere else, and it is not available on any App Store outside the United States. The website can be read from anywhere, and its Sky Score works for any place, but Skysta is run from the United States, under United States law, and is not aimed at people in any other country.

2. Your account

Skysta requires an account, and there is nothing in the app you can reach without one. There is no signed-out browsing, no guest feed and no preview.

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

You must use an email address you control, and you must confirm it. If you sign up with an email address and a password, we send a link to that address and you have to follow it before you can use the app. Until you do, the only screen you can reach is the one asking you to. This applies to accounts created on or after 19 August 2026; accounts created before that date keep working as they were, and Sign in with Apple is not affected, because Apple has already established who you are.

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

We ask you for a name before the app opens, and it is not optional. One screen, after the address check and before anything else, asks what we should call you. There is no skip. That name is published on every sky you share, and the screen says so before you type it. A profile picture is offered on the same screen and that one is up to you. Both are visible to every Skysta account. An account signed in with Apple sees the same screen. If you let Apple share your name, it is filled in for you, and you can keep it, change it or replace it before anything is published.

You can change either at any time in Settings. We do not publish anything taken from your email address, and if a sky is ever shared by an account with no name on it, it carries A Skysta watcher instead. 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 Apple-branded products that you own or control, as permitted by the Usage Rules in Apple’s Media Services Terms and Conditions, and by the other accounts in your Family Sharing group. It is for your own non-commercial use. You may not:

• copy, modify, decompile, or reverse-engineer the app, except where the law says you may;
• reverse-engineer the weather data in the app or on skystaapp.com, or the weather service that data comes from;
• rent, sell, sublicense, or redistribute the app;
• 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 to 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.

Weather data may not be accurate. Apple, whose WeatherKit service supplies Skysta’s forecasts, asks us to say this in exactly these words: YOUR USE OF THIS REAL TIME WEATHER GUIDANCE APPLICATION OR WEBSITE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. WEATHER DATA MAY NOT BE ACCURATE. Apple Weather Data may vary from actual conditions due to variable factors, such as signal issues and geopolitical events, that can affect the accuracy of Apple Weather Data. This covers the app and the Sky Score on skystaapp.com.

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 judges haze on visibility alone and says so beside the score, rather than pretending it measured the air.

5. Going outside is your responsibility

Trusted spots are curated for the view. Each one is researched before it is published and then approved by a person, one fact at a time. The research is done from public sources: maps and satellite images, official park, city and land-manager pages, and what has been published about the place. A person then checks the coordinate against the map, checks that the place looks open to the public, records what kind of place it is and how you get in, and turns down anything that looks closed, private or too hard to reach rather than publishing it with a caveat. Nothing an automated research pass wrote about parking, hours, fees or hazards is ever shown to you: a fact of that kind reaches the app only once a person has marked that they checked it themselves, and a spot with no recorded kind of public access is not published at all.

All of that work happens at a desk. Nobody from Skysta visits a spot. Turning down what looks wrong is a screen, not a safety inspection, and passing it is not a promise that a place we publish is safe. 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, and it is backed up to your account

A capture you keep in your Journal is held in Skysta’s own storage on your phone, kept out of your iCloud backup, and copied to your own private area of our storage, so that your photographs follow your account instead of dying with a phone. That copy is readable by your account and by no other: it is not in the feed, it is not on your public profile, and no share link can reach it.

The coordinate is part of the copy since 15 September 2026, and a spot tag is. Where you were standing goes into the copy that only your account can read, so it comes back with the photograph on a new phone; the privacy policy’s section 2.2 says why that changed. If the photograph carried a trusted spot tag, the copy keeps that spot’s public name, and a restored photograph comes back wearing it. A spot name is a place, so we say that rather than claiming the copy carries no location at all.

We do not open these files. Administrator access to our own servers exists, as it does for any service of this kind, and we use it on a Journal backup in three ways, all of them deletions. The retention rule in §11: after six months without use, an account’s Journal backup may be deleted. A hand erasure of an account, which §11 also describes, and which deletes the whole backup with everything else. And a removal you ask us for by email. There is no setting that turns the backup off.

Storing your Journal backup gives us no licence to it. We hold it to give it back to you. The licence in §6.3 covers only skies you choose to share.

Signing out erases the Journal from the device but leaves the backup, so signing back in returns your photographs. Deleting a photograph deletes its backup with it. Deleting your account deletes the whole backup, however many photographs it holds. If any of them will not delete, the app stops and tells you rather than deleting your account over it.

Privacy Policy §3.2 sets all of this out in full, including the parts that are not flattering.

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, including Skysta’s Lock Screen card, 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. Two kinds of copy outlive it, and they are not the same, so each gets its own bullet.

• The storage service’s own copy ages out, seven days after we delete the file, and then it is destroyed. That one really is automatic and nothing has to be opened for it to happen. §10 and Privacy Policy §6 both say so.
• Our own dated copies of the database are kept for thirty days. We take one a day onto the developer’s Mac so a bad script cannot destroy months of work. The tool on that Mac runs all the time and deletes a copy once it is more than thirty days old. There are three exceptions we do not gloss: the three newest copies are kept whatever their age, one copy from 20 August 2026 is protected by name because the tool checks a sealed inventory bound to it, and a copy whose own date cannot be read is left alone rather than guessed at. These copies hold database records rather than pictures, so your photograph is not in them, but your display name and any place on the post are. Privacy Policy §6 has the whole of it. We will remove yours by hand if you ask.

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 can take back, and what you cannot

Please read this part before you share anything.

• A published sky cannot be edited, with one exception that only ever removes. The photograph cannot be changed and neither can anything else about the post, because our servers refuse every change but one: you can take the place off your own sky. Open it from the feed or your public page, tap the ⋯ menu, choose Remove the place. The map pin, the town name, the trusted-spot tag and the coarse cell all go together and the photograph stays. It cannot be undone: the rule that allows this only allows those fields to be removed, so nothing in any version of this app, ours or anybody’s, can put a place back on a published sky or move one. Everything else about a post is fixed forever, and deleting the whole post is still available at any time from the same ⋯ menu.
• Skysta will not hand your photograph to anyone else. Save to Photos appears only on your own skies and your own Journal, never on somebody else’s, and Send this sky on somebody else’s sky sends a link rather than the picture. See §6.7.
• We still cannot stop a screenshot. Anybody looking at your sky can photograph their own screen, and no app can prevent that. Assume a shared sky can be kept by whoever sees it.
• Only a sky you have shared can be sent. A sky you keep in your Journal has no Send at all, and Skysta has no way to send a sky privately to one person.
• 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 3 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 skies, newest first. The page shows your newest sixty; older ones are not deleted and still open from their own link. The top of the page shows the place named on your newest sky that names one, beside how many skies you have shared; 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. That page shows the spot’s newest forty.

Nothing is removed automatically, ever. There is no timer anywhere in Skysta that takes a sky down. Two people can take one down by hand: you, at any time, from the ⋯ menu; and us, from outside the app. The ⋯ menu is the only route any copy of Skysta offers anybody. We use administrator access to a post for four things, all of them removals: moderation, which §10 describes; a takedown you write and ask us for; removing a post that no copy of the app can reach, which Privacy Policy §11.1 describes; and erasing an account by hand, which §11 describes. We also use it to put back a sky we took down, when the decision was wrong or a copyright counter notification asks for it. Share accordingly.

6.7 Sharing a sky by link

Every shared sky has an address: https://skystaapp.com/s/…. Tapping Send this sky on somebody else’s sky puts that address into the system share sheet, so you can send it in a message, an email, or anywhere else. Tapping Send this sky on one of your own skies does something different, and §6.8 sets it out.

What a link does.

• It opens that sky inside Skysta on an iPhone that has the app.
• Whoever opens it still has to sign in, and a new email account still has to confirm its address, before the photograph is drawn.
• Without the app, it opens a page on our website which says the sky lives in the app. That page does not show the photograph, and neither does the preview a messaging app builds from it.

What a link does not do.

• It does not send the photograph. Sharing somebody else’s sky attaches the link and nothing else, so forwarding a link is not the same as forwarding the image. There is no control in Skysta that hands you somebody else’s picture.
• It does not reach anything private. A link can only name a sky that has already been shared. There is no link, of any shape, that reaches a capture you kept in your Journal.
• It does not grant anybody any right in your photograph. Receiving a link, or passing one on, gives nobody permission to copy, publish, print, or sell what is on the other end. Your rights under §6.1 are unaffected.
• It does not survive the post. Delete the sky and the link stops resolving to it.

Sending a link is a choice about your own sky. If it carries a map pin or a spot tag, the person you send it to sees those too, and so does anybody they forward it to. Read §7 before you share a sky with a location on it, and read it again before you send that link on.

6.8 Sending your own sky sends a card with the picture on it

Tapping Send this sky on one of your own shared skies draws a card and hands it, with the sky’s link, straight to your phone’s share sheet. There is nothing to answer. The card carries the photograph, your display name and profile picture, and whether it was a sunrise or a sunset, all of which is already public on the sky. The message carries one more line, saying what the light was, such as “Afterglow, 6 min after sunset”. The card carries no Sky Score, no spot name, no town, no coordinate, no account identifier and no post identifier.

Only a sky you have shared can be sent. A sky you keep in your Journal has no Send at all. If the sky is pinned on Skysta’s map, that pin was agreed when you published and this screen cannot take it back. §7 can.

7. Location on a shared sky

Skysta publishes your exact position whenever the map switch is on, and then it publishes it exactly. The switch starts off. Two separate controls decide what a shared sky says about where it was taken, they work independently, and a post can carry both.

And one thing is published with no control at all: a sky you share carries a coarse grid cell, about 5.5 km across, of where it was taken, so that people near it can find it in their Local feed. On the map it is drawn as a town-sized area of about 5.5 km, never as a point. The town name is not worked out from this cell. It comes from a separate, finer point, about 1.1 km across, which is only ever asked about and is never stored and never published; the privacy policy sets that out at §2.1 and §4. This paragraph said the opposite until 19 September 2026, and the app stopped naming towns from the coarse cell on 13 September 2026. It is on the post record, readable by every signed-in account, whichever way the switch sits. The cell is written only when the photograph has a coordinate to derive it from. A sky you keep in your Journal publishes nothing about where it was taken at all.

“Show on the map.” This starts OFF, for everyone, on every photograph. Nothing seeds it from anything you did not choose: not from your last answer, not from your age, which we do not know and do not ask, and not from where you are. Turning it on for one photograph turns it on for that photograph only, and the next one starts off again.

One thing can change where it starts, and only because you set it: Settings → Location & units → Show on the map, which ships off. That is a standing answer you give once rather than a memory of your last one, it changes where the switch starts and nothing else, and one tap on any photograph still decides that photograph.

Leave it off, which is how you will find it, and your sky carries no exact coordinate. It still carries the coarse cell, so it still reaches the Local feed of people near where it was taken and is drawn on the map as a town-sized area. It still names its town, worked out from the finer point described above, unless you have turned Name the town off. Turn it on, which takes one tap, and the post also 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. The town’s name is not this switch’s to decide.

The spot tag. If the photograph was taken within about 500 metres of a trusted spot, Skysta attaches that spot’s name to the sky. This is on, which is how it ships whenever 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.

It does not matter whether you planned that spot, opened it, or knew it was there: being near one is enough for the tag to appear, and the distance is measured to whichever of the spot’s published points is nearest, including its car park. Look at the share screen rather than assuming there is no tag to remove.

Because the tag starts on, we do not treat leaving it alone as your consent to it, and we do not pretend otherwise. The map switch is the other way round: it starts off, so nothing about the exact spot you stood on is published unless it is on, and it is only ever on because you turned it on or asked for it to start that way. Privacy Policy §13.3 sets out how each one starts, the reasoning behind the tag, and the three ways to take the tag off.

If you keep a spot tag and also turn the map on, 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. That changes what the map shows, not what the post holds: sharing with the switch on always publishes your exact coordinate, and a shared post is readable in full by every signed-in account. If you do not want that disclosure, leave the map switch off.

You can strip the location off a sky you have already shared, and keep the photograph. Open it from the feed or your public page, tap the ⋯ menu, choose Remove the place. The pin, the town name, the spot tag and the coarse cell go together, and the picture stays exactly where it is. Three things to know before you tap it:

• It is all of the place or none of it. We will not offer to take the pin off while leaving the town name on, because that would tell you a location had been removed when the post still said where you were.
• It cannot be undone. Our server rule permits these fields to be removed and never to be written, so nothing can put a place back afterwards, not you and not us. The app says so before you confirm.
• It does not reach a screenshot. Anybody who already looked at that sky already saw where it was.

Deleting the whole post is still there and still removes more. It is simply not the only way.

Full detail of what is collected and sent is in our Privacy Policy, at §4 for the exact list a shared sky publishes and §7 for the removal.

8. Spot suggestions

If you suggest a viewing spot, you send us the name you gave it, its town if you entered one, its state or country, a coordinate you picked on the map, whether it is best for sunrise, sunset or both, and what you wrote about why the sky is good there. By sending it you promise 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. Verifying means reading public sources and checking the pin on a map from a desk. Nobody goes to the place.

You can see the status of your own suggestions in Settings → Help → My suggestions. Nobody else can see them. You cannot withdraw or edit one from inside the app. Email hello@skystaapp.com and we will remove yours.

A spot you suggest on the website, at skystaapp.com/spots/suggest, is sent on the same terms: you send the same fields, plus an email address if you want a reply, which we use only to write back about that place and delete once we have; you make the same promises, and you grant the same licence, with no obligation on us to publish, credit, or pay you. There is no account behind a website suggestion and no page that shows its status; the form says so before you send it. To have one removed, email hello@skystaapp.com with the name of the place and roughly when you sent it.

8.1 Spot corrections

At the foot of every trusted spot’s page there is a line reading Something wrong here?. It sends us the spot, what kind of thing is wrong, and up to 1000 characters you write about it, along with your account identifier. It is a letter to us, not an edit: nothing you send changes what the app shows anybody until a curator has checked it and published the change through the same gate every other curation goes through. We may act on it, rewrite it, or do nothing, and we owe you no credit and no payment for it.

You cannot read a correction back, and neither can any other copy of the app. A readable list of the places we are currently wrong about is not something to put on a phone, so there is no screen that shows you what you sent. It is also not removed when you delete your account. Email hello@skystaapp.com and we will remove it.

8.2 Feedback

Settings → Help → Share feedback sends us a note, along with your account identifier and the app version. A person reads it.

Please do not put anything in that box that you need back or need kept private: like a suggestion, a note cannot be read back, edited, or deleted from inside the app, and it is not removed when you delete your account. Email us and we will remove it.

Anything you tell us about how Skysta could be better, we may use, without owing you payment, credit, or confidentiality. That is not a claim on anything else you own. It covers the note you chose to send us and nothing more.

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.

You can share one sky per capture window. A capture window is the stretch of good light around one sunrise or one sunset. Photograph as many skies as you like inside it and keep them all in your Journal, because nothing limits what you keep. The limit is on what you publish, and it is there so the feed does not fill up with the same sky from the same angle over and over.

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.

Appreciations are a private thank-you, and must not be used to harass anybody. Tapping the heart on somebody else’s shared sky sends its author an appreciation and, if they allow it, a notification saying so. Only the two of you can see it. Appreciating somebody’s skies over and over when they do not want it, or using appreciations to follow, pressure or intimidate somebody, is misuse under this section, and the report and block tools in §10 apply to it. The Privacy Policy, §5.4, says what an appreciation records and who sees it.

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

An automatic check comes first. When you share a sky to the feed, your own phone runs Apple’s sensitive-content check on the photograph before it goes. It runs on the device, the picture is never uploaded to be judged, and nobody sees it. If that check flags the image, Skysta refuses to publish it and says so; the photograph stays in your Journal and you can share a different one. It is not a human decision and there is no queue behind it, so if you think it got your sky wrong, write to hello@skystaapp.com and a person will look. The check only runs when Sensitive Content Warning or Communication Safety is switched on in your iOS Settings, so treat it as a first filter and never the only one. A photograph you keep in your Journal is never checked.

A profile picture goes through the same check. Everyone signed in to Skysta sees your profile picture beside your byline (§6.4), so before we accept the picture you picked, the same on-device check runs on it, on the same terms: only when Sensitive Content Warning or Communication Safety is on in your iOS Settings, and never with the picture uploaded to be judged. If the check flags it, Skysta refuses it before anything is stored, and the picture you already had stays. A photograph in your Journal is still never checked. Privacy Policy §3.3 is a table of what is screened and what is not.

And you can report a person, not only a photograph. Tap their name or their picture on any sky they have shared to open their page; its ⋯ menu has Report this person and Block. That report is about the account, the face and the name beside it, so flagging an avatar no longer means filing a complaint against an innocent photograph. From every appreciation in your Activity list you can reach Report this person and Block as well: tapping the sender’s picture there opens their page. One limit is still real, and we would rather say it than let “report and block” cover it: every route to a person’s page runs through a sky they shared or an appreciation they sent you, so somebody who has done neither cannot be reached from any screen in the app. Write to hello@skystaapp.com and a person will look and take it down.

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 takes that person’s skies out of Skysta for you: your Moments feed, the trusted-spot galleries, their page, any link to one of their skies, and your Lock Screen card, on every device you sign in to. It also stops their appreciations reaching you: you are not notified about them and they are not shown to you. They are not told. You can see everyone you have blocked, and unblock them, in Settings → Blocked people.

Our commitment. We read every report and we aim to 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.

What stands behind that number, said plainly. One person reads the reports, on a page that lists them newest first and shows how long each one has waited, beside how long the oldest open report has been there. There is no team, no rotation and no overnight shift. In practice a report is seen the same day. If that person is ill, travelling, or off the network, it can take longer, and we would rather write that here than let a number imply a staffed desk. Nothing about the reading is automatic. Nothing alerts anybody the moment a report arrives. Three times a day, at 9 am, 3 pm and 9 pm Utah time, the Mac the reports are read on checks for waiting reports and puts up a notification if there are any. That only works while that Mac is on.

If we act on something of yours, we tell you. We email the address on the account and we say three things: what we removed or restricted, the ground we did it on, and how to contest it. That email is written by a person, from the same queue the report arrived in; it is not generated and not sent automatically. The ground is either the rule in §9 that the content broke or the law that required it. To contest a decision, reply to that email or write to hello@skystaapp.com. A person reads it and answers. If we got it wrong we say so and put it right where we still can.

One thing we have to be exact about here, because it is the sentence you reach after we have taken something down. A photograph we deleted is gone from Skysta straight away. It is off the feed, off your profile, off the spot’s gallery, and no link reaches it. Our server watches for a deleted record and removes its photograph too, unless it was a takedown that kept the picture (below), and tries again if that fails. But Google Cloud Storage, where the pictures live, keeps a deleted file in a recoverable state for seven days before it destroys it. That applies to every photograph the app deletes: a sky you withdrew, a Journal photograph you removed, your profile picture, and everything that goes when you delete your account. No switch inside Skysta changes it.

A takedown is the exception, and it is deliberately the other way round. When we take something down, we disable access to it and KEEP the photograph. The sky comes off the feed, off your profile, off the spot’s gallery, and no Skysta link reaches it, exactly as before; what is different is that the picture itself is not destroyed. The post’s record goes into a store no copy of the app can read, with the reason we wrote. The picture stays in storage at the same address it always had. No screen in Skysta shows it and no Skysta link reaches it, but somebody who already holds the picture’s own web address can still open it until we destroy it or put it back. We keep it so that if we got the decision wrong, or a copyright counter notification arrives weeks later, the sky can go back exactly as it was rather than as a rebuild. The seven day window is what bounds the cases where destruction was the point: illegal material, or your own request to have a photograph gone.

The only exception to telling you first is illegal content, or a real and immediate danger to somebody. There we act first and explain straight afterwards.

What happens to a report you file. Tell us what is wrong and where. The in-app report does that in one tap; an email to hello@skystaapp.com does the same and lets you say more, and either is fine.

There is no automatic receipt, and this paragraph used to say there was. The app confirms on screen that your report was sent, and that is the whole of what happens by itself. When we have acted on your report, we email the address on your account and tell you what we decided. If you would rather not wait for that, or you disagree with it, reply or write to hello@skystaapp.com, and a person reads it and answers. Reports made in bad faith or in volume may be ignored.

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.

10.1 Copyright, and how to tell us about it

If you believe something on Skysta infringes a copyright you own or control, tell us and we will act. We remove infringing material, and we close the accounts of people who infringe repeatedly.

There are two ways to do it, and the first one is enough for most people. Write to hello@skystaapp.com with the subject line Copyright notice and say what the work is, what on Skysta is infringing it, that you are allowed to act for the owner, and how to reach you. A link to the sky, or the name on the post and roughly when it appeared, is usually enough to find it. Skysta is run by Cy Liassides, who reads them personally. Nothing about that route asks you to swear an oath or go near a court, and we act on it the same way.

The second way is a formal notice under the United States DMCA. Since 15 September 2026 Skysta is registered with the United States Copyright Office and has a designated agent, so a notice under 17 U.S.C. §512(c)(3) reaches somebody who is registered to receive it.

The designated agent

Cy Liassides, 4318 N 400 W, Lehi, UT 84043, United States. Phone 801-368-4330. Email hello@skystaapp.com.

Registered with the United States Copyright Office, registration number DMCA-1079417. The Office’s public directory carries the same details.

What a formal notice has to contain

The statute asks for substantially the following, which is its own word. Get the substance right and the notice counts; a notice missing something important may not:

• your physical or electronic signature;
• the copyrighted work you say has been infringed, or a representative list if there are several;
• the material you say is infringing, described well enough that we can find and remove it;
• enough for us to reach you, such as an address, a telephone number and, if you have one, an email address;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent, or the law;
• a statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the owner or are authorised to act for the owner.

What we do when one arrives

We disable access to the material promptly. It comes off the feed, off the author’s profile, off any spot gallery, and no Skysta link reaches it. We keep the photograph itself rather than destroying it, so that a counter notification can actually be honoured: a counter notification can arrive at any time, and when one does the material goes back up 10 to 14 business days later, while our storage provider keeps a destroyed file recoverable for only seven days. Destroying it on the way out would make the promise below impossible to keep. We tell the person who posted it what came down and why, exactly as §10 describes, and we tell them they can send a counter notification.

Counter notification, if we took down something of yours

If you believe your material was removed by mistake or misidentification, send a counter notification to the same agent above. It has to contain:

• your physical or electronic signature;
• the material that was removed and where it was before it was removed;
• a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith it was removed by mistake or misidentification;
• your name, address and telephone number, your consent to the jurisdiction of the United States District Court for the district you live in (or, if you live outside the United States, for any district where Skysta may be found), and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the original notice, or from their agent.

We forward a valid counter notification to whoever sent the original notice. Unless they first tell us that they have filed a court action to stop you, the material goes back up between 10 and 14 business days after your counter notification reached us. That band is the statute’s, and it describes when we act; it is not a deadline you have to meet, and §512 sets you none.

Please do not send a notice you know to be false. Under 17 U.S.C. §512(f), somebody who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that it was removed by mistake, can be liable for the damages that misrepresentation causes. Claiming a copyright you do not hold in order to have somebody else’s photograph taken down is a misuse of this address and we treat it as one.

Repeat infringers. We have a policy of closing, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of people who infringe repeatedly, and §11 describes what closing an account does.

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, your Journal backup, your saved spots, every appreciation you sent and received and the notification tokens of your phones (Privacy Policy §5.4), the record behind your Lock Screen card, your blocked list, your online-status record and your profile picture, tries to disconnect Sign in with Apple if you used it, and then wipes the phone. We ask you to prove it is you first, with your password or the Apple sheet again, and nothing is touched until you have. The one exception is a session that is under two minutes old, which the app treats as proof enough and does not ask again, unless it is an Apple sign-in and Skysta has been closed and opened since; Privacy Policy §11, step 1, sets out exactly when that applies. If any of your shared skies, backed-up Journal photographs, saved spots, appreciations, those notification tokens, that Lock Screen record or your online-status record cannot be removed, the app stops and tells you rather than deleting your account and leaving your things behind. The Lock Screen record is on that list because a server reads it on a timer. 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 everything we hold. Reports filed about a post are retained so that moderation decisions remain reviewable, and that one we do not remove even if you ask, because it is somebody else’s complaint.

Several other things stay in our queues, because no part of the app can reach them. Reports you filed about others. A sky we took down, and its kept picture. Spot suggestions, spot corrections and feedback you sent. A review of a trusted spot, if there is one under your account. A small server-side count of the verification emails we sent you. And the counts our server keeps for the limits on appreciations (Privacy Policy §5.4). None of those is permanent. Ask and we will remove them by hand. Privacy Policy §11.1 lists everything that can survive.

The trusted-spot review is worth one more line. No copy of the app writes one now and no copy of the app can read that collection, including yours, so anything in it comes out by hand.

Erasing an account ourselves does not clear all of those. It removes the reports you filed, a sky we took down and its picture, your corrections, your feedback, any trusted-spot review, the verification counter and the appreciation limits record. It does not remove a spot suggestion: it takes your account identifier off the record and keeps the rest, because a spot in the catalogue would otherwise lose the record of where it came from. What stays on it is the place name you gave, the town, the coordinate you marked on the map, and what you wrote about why the sky is good there. What goes is the field that says it was yours. If you want the whole record gone, say so when you write to us; we can do by hand what that tool will not.

And three copies outlive the button without anybody keeping them on purpose. Every photograph we delete stays recoverable in Google Cloud Storage for seven days before it is destroyed. Every deleted database record is readable at an earlier moment for one hour. And we take a dated copy of nine database collections onto the developer’s Mac once a day, so a bad script cannot destroy months of work. A copy taken before you left still holds your email address, and any sky you had shared with its coordinate and place name.

Those copies are kept for thirty days. The tool deletes a copy once it is older than that, with three exceptions we would rather write down than let you assume away: the three newest copies are always kept however old they get, one copy is protected by name because the tool binds a sealed inventory to it and age would break the tool, and a copy whose own date cannot be read is skipped rather than guessed at.

Until 20 September 2026 the rule had never deleted anything, because no copy was old enough. Since then the oldest copies age out on their own. No copy in that folder holds a photograph. If you want your records out of those copies sooner, they come out by hand, because there is no automated way to take one record out of one file.

If we ever acted on your account, the record that we did survives, and that one we will not remove. Taking a post down, switching an account off or back on, erasing one, or deleting a dormant Journal backup each writes a line saying what was done and when. The account identifier stays, with no account left behind it. A line carries no name and no email address. A decision we can be made to forget is not a decision anybody can review, which is the whole point of keeping it. If you think the decision itself was wrong, §10 says how to contest it and we will answer.

A Journal backup on a dormant account. If an account goes six months without being used, we may delete its private Journal backup. Nothing else goes: the account, the profile, and every shared sky stay, and the photographs on that person’s own phone are untouched. This is a decision made one account at a time, by hand.

Our software enforces those six months. The button reads the account’s own last-used date first and refuses outright if it falls inside the last six months, naming the date the backup does become eligible. Six calendar months, counted properly, rather than 180 days, which is up to four days short of them. The page can still be set to show accounts quiet for three months, because looking is not deleting, but the button refuses those rows one at a time.

What has not changed is that nothing deletes on its own. There is no timer and no scheduled job. Eligibility is a floor, and the deletion is still a hand on a button, which is why this says we may delete and not that we will. Privacy Policy §6.1 sets out how “used” is measured.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you break these terms, if the law requires it, or if we stop operating Skysta. We will tell you before we do, and say why and how to contest it, exactly as §10 describes. The exception is the same one: illegal content or somebody in danger, where we act first and explain straight afterwards. 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, the reverse geocoder that names towns, and the push service that starts and ends the Lock Screen card with the app closed and delivers the notification that tells you somebody appreciated your sky.

• Google Maps, only if you choose it for directions to a trusted spot. The link carries the spot as the destination and nothing about you, and once the Google Maps app is open it uses your position under Google’s own policy.

• Google Firebase: authentication, the database and storage that hold shared skies, your private Journal backup (§6.2), your saved spots, presence, the cloud function that sends the address-verification email, the scheduled function that reads your Lock Screen card record (Privacy Policy §2), the function that records an appreciation and sends its notice (Privacy Policy §5.4), the functions that remove a deleted sky’s photograph and its appreciations, the hosting and the function behind the website, and (only if you switch them on) crash reporting and analytics. Those are two separate answers rather than one, and saying yes to either does not say yes to the other. One is crash reports: if the app breaks, the report about the break goes to Firebase, and Privacy Policy §8.3 sets out exactly what is on one and what is not. The other is app counts: nine kinds of event of our own, plus a few that Firebase records by itself, such as how long the app was open, all listed in Privacy Policy §8. Both answers start off, neither is ticked for you, and signing out turns both off.

  Crash reports are asked about in the app rather than only in Settings. On the launch after Skysta actually breaks, a card says so and asks for the report that is sitting on your own phone. Nothing has been sent at that point: the crash library writes its report to your storage before it looks at whether sending is switched on, and only the sending is switched. Say yes and it goes. Say no and it is deleted. You are asked once, and it is never a notification.

• Open-Meteo: the air-quality reading behind the haze part of the Sky Score, using Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service data, and, on the website only, the cloud layers behind the website’s Sky Score and the place search.

• OpenStreetMap and OpenFreeMap, on the website only: naming the town for a rounded position, and the map tiles behind the map of spots, with OpenStreetMap’s own map underneath when a browser cannot draw ours.

• The U.S. Geological Survey, on the website only: the aerial photographs behind the map’s Satellite switch.

• Resend: delivery of the address-verification email for new email accounts.

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. Using Skysta also means keeping to the terms of those services where they apply to you.

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 above limits liability that the law does not let us limit. To be completely clear, and not “in some places”: we never exclude or limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation. Those limits do not exist, anywhere, for anyone. Nor do we exclude anything else the law where you live says cannot be excluded. Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages, so parts of this section may not apply to you, and where that is so you keep every protection that law gives you.

We say this deliberately rather than in passing, because §5 is an invitation to stand on a cliff before dawn.

Indemnity, and who it applies to. If you use Skysta as a business or otherwise not as a consumer, 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.

If you are a consumer, there is no indemnity. You are responsible for what you post and the ordinary law decides what that means. We are not asking you to sign up to costs the law would not give us anyway.

14. Apple

Where you obtained Skysta from Apple’s App Store, this section applies. These terms are between you and us, not Apple.

Support is ours alone, at hello@skystaapp.com. Apple has no obligation to provide any maintenance or support for Skysta.

We, not Apple, answer any claim you or anyone else makes about Skysta or about your use of it. That covers product liability, a claim that Skysta does not meet a legal or regulatory requirement, and a claim under consumer protection, privacy or similar law. If somebody says Skysta infringes their intellectual property, we, not Apple, investigate it, defend it, settle it and pay for it.

Warranties are ours too. We are solely responsible for any warranty on Skysta, whether we give it or the law implies it, so far as §13 has not effectively disclaimed it. If Skysta ever fails to meet a warranty that applies to it, you can tell Apple, and Apple will refund what you paid for it, which for Skysta is nothing. Beyond that refund, Apple has no warranty obligation of any kind, and anything else that follows from a failed warranty is ours to answer for. §13 still sets the limits on what we owe, and nothing there or here takes away a protection the mandatory law where you live gives you.

Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms, and once you accept them, Apple has the right, and is treated as having accepted the right, to enforce them against you.

You confirm that you are not located in a country that is subject to a US Government embargo, or that the US Government has designated a “terrorist supporting” country, 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. The state and federal courts located in the State of Utah have exclusive jurisdiction, and you and we both agree to that venue.

We have not asked you to give up your right to go to court. There is no arbitration clause in this agreement and no class-action waiver. If we ever add one, we will say so plainly in §16, in its own dated entry on the changes page, because a term like that changes your rights and should never arrive quietly.

Nothing in these terms takes away a protection that the mandatory law of your state gives you as a consumer, and nothing in them stops you bringing a small claim in your own local small-claims court where that court has jurisdiction.

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 change these terms, but only for a reason, and these are the reasons: the law or a regulator requires it; a feature is added, changed, or removed; a service Skysta depends on changes its own terms; or we have to close a security or abuse problem. We will not change them to take away something you already have for no reason at all.

How you will be told, and what that is worth. The date at the top of this page changes, and the release that carries the change describes it. Skysta has no in-app messaging, so the changes page is the notice. Every change is written down there, dated, in the words used at the time, and never edited afterwards. This section’s dated entries live on that page and are numbered §16.1, §16.2 and onwards, which is why there are none under this heading.

If you do not accept a change, stop using Skysta and delete your account in Settings. There is nothing to pay and nothing to cancel. Continuing to use Skysta after a change has taken effect means the new terms apply from then on. A change never applies backwards to something you did before it, and no change takes away a right the law gives you as a consumer.

17. Contact

hello@skystaapp.com is the address for all of it: support, reports, complaints, takedowns, copyright notices, legal notices, and anything an authority needs to send us. It is read every day and answered in English.

Skysta is made and operated by Cy Liassides, in Utah, in the United States. There is no company behind it and no staff. Questions, complaints and claims about Skysta can also go by post or phone to Cy Liassides, 4318 N 400 W, Lehi, UT 84043, United States, 801-368-4330.

Designated agent for copyright notices, registered with the United States Copyright Office under 17 U.S.C. §512(c)(2), registration number DMCA-1079417:

Cy Liassides, 4318 N 400 W, Lehi, UT 84043, United States. Phone 801-368-4330. Email hello@skystaapp.com.

That address is published here because the statute asks for it to be somewhere public on the site, and it is in the Copyright Office’s public directory for the same reason. §10.1 says what a notice needs to contain and what happens next.

The Skysta app is offered only in the United States, and Skysta is not aimed at people anywhere else, though the website can be read from anywhere. If that ever changes, these terms change with it and the date at the top moves.