Privacy policy

No account, no profile

You can open Dark Skies and start planning immediately. There is no sign-up, no email, no password and no user profile. We do not build an advertising profile of you, and the app has no ads.

Information you provide

The following stay on your device, stored locally by the app:

• Saved locations — spots you save for planning, including any you search for and add manually.
• Camera, lens, and photography-profile settings — used to prefill exposure calculations.
• Notification preferences — whether Best Night alerts are on.
• Analytics and diagnostics preference — your on/off choice, described below.

If you contact us by email, we receive whatever you choose to include in that message (for example your device model or app version) — see Contact below.

Location

If you grant location access, Dark Skies uses it to calculate sky and weather conditions for your spot — the dark window, Night Score, Milky Way and Moon timing, the local forecast, map view, and nearby public-recreation destinations. Location access is controlled entirely through your device's system settings, and you can use manually entered or saved locations instead if you decline or later revoke access.

On iOS, Dark Skies requests location only while the app is in use, at reduced (coarse, city-scale) accuracy — never in the background, and never continuously. On Android, Dark Skies requests approximate and precise location, also only while the app is in use; no background-location permission is requested. Neither platform runs location lookups to power notifications or widgets — Best Night alerts and home-screen widgets read a snapshot the app already computed, not a live location fetch.

To produce a forecast or map, the app sends your coordinates to the relevant service provider — the weather provider, the mapping provider, and (for nearby destinations) the RIDB/Recreation.gov catalog described below — solely to return results for that point. These requests are not tied to an account and are not used to identify or track you.

Camera and motion (AR)

The optional AR sky view uses your camera to overlay sky targets on the live image, and motion sensors to align them. Nothing from the camera is recorded, saved, or transmitted.

Notifications

If you turn on Best Night alerts, the app schedules local notifications on your device to let you know when a good night is coming. These do not require a server and are not push notifications. You can turn them off any time in your device's notification settings.

Widgets

Home-screen widgets, where supported, display forecast and Night Score information the app already calculated during your last visit. Widgets do not request location or network access on their own.

AI-generated explanations

On supported devices, Dark Skies may use on-device system intelligence (such as Apple Intelligence, where available) to generate a short plain-language explanation alongside your Night Score. This runs on-device — nothing is sent to Apple or any third party to produce it. The Night Score itself is always calculated by Dark Skies' own logic; the generated text is explanatory only and is not an authoritative forecast.

Analytics and diagnostics

Analytics and diagnostics are optional and can be changed at any time in Settings ("App Diagnostics"). On Android, this is off by default for new installs. On iOS, new installs may show the option preselected on during first-run onboarding, but you can turn it off before finishing setup, and later in Settings; existing users keep whatever choice they've already made across app updates.

When enabled, diagnostics may share crash reports (stack traces, device model, OS and app version) and coarse usage events (such as which screens or features you open) with Firebase Analytics and Firebase Crashlytics (Google), which we use to improve reliability, fix bugs, and make product decisions. This data does not include your saved-location coordinates or names, gear profiles, free text, or purchase/transaction identifiers. Firebase may separately attach its own pseudonymous app-instance or installation identifier and coarse network-derived geography to this data as part of how its SDKs operate; this identifier is not a Dark Skies account or custom user ID. We do not use analytics for third-party advertising, and Dark Skies does not use or request advertising identifiers.

We avoid calling this data fully anonymous, since Firebase's own identifiers and infrastructure are involved in delivering it — it is better described as pseudonymous and not directly associated with an account or your identity.

Third-party services

Depending on platform, Dark Skies relies on the following outside services to provide its features. None of them receive your saved-location names, gear profiles, or purchase history.

• Apple WeatherKit (iOS) — forecast conditions for your chosen coordinates. See Apple's privacy policy.
• Apple Maps (iOS) — the map view in Places. See Apple's privacy policy.
• Google Maps Platform (Android) — the map view in Places. See Google's privacy policy.
• Firebase Analytics and Crashlytics (Google) — optional diagnostics, described above.
• NASA Black Marble — nighttime-light data used to calculate darkness information, bundled with the app for offline use. This is a public NASA dataset; use of it does not imply NASA's endorsement of Dark Skies.
• Recreation.gov / RIDB (Recreation Information Database) — the source of nearby public-recreation destination listings, bundled with the app. Use of this data does not imply endorsement by Recreation.gov or any participating land-management agency.
• Apple App Store / StoreKit and Google Play Billing — process purchases, described below.
• Apple Intelligence / on-device system intelligence (where available) — generates optional explanatory text, described above; runs on-device.
• Our email provider, if you contact [email protected].

We link to a few of these directly rather than every provider's policy, to keep this page useful rather than a wall of links.

Purchases

Dark Skies is free to start, with optional Pro upgrades (monthly, annual, and/or lifetime, depending on platform and current store pricing). Purchases are processed entirely by Apple's App Store or Google Play under their own terms. Dark Skies receives only the entitlement or transaction-status information needed to unlock Pro features — we do not directly receive, process, or store your payment-card details. Apple and Google may independently collect information about your purchase under their own privacy policies.

Retention and deletion

Because Dark Skies has no account, most of your data lives only on your device. You can remove it at any time by deleting saved locations or profiles in the app, resetting settings, or uninstalling the app — uninstalling removes all locally stored data and stops any future diagnostics from that installation.

Uninstalling does not retroactively remove diagnostics already sent to Firebase before that point; those records follow Google's own retention and deletion practices for Analytics and Crashlytics. Because Dark Skies has no account and does not maintain a way to map a pseudonymous Firebase record back to a specific person, we cannot process individual deletion requests for already-submitted diagnostics — but you can turn diagnostics off going forward at any time. If you'd like us to delete a support email you sent us, contact us and we will remove it, except where we're required to keep records for legal or fraud-prevention purposes.

Children

Dark Skies is a general-audience app not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us information (for example, through a support email), contact us and we will delete it.

International use

Dark Skies is used worldwide. Our service providers (including Apple, Google, and the data sources above) may process information in countries other than your own, under their own privacy and data-transfer safeguards.

Changes

If this policy changes, we will update the date above and post the revised version here.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email [email protected].

Common questions