Privacy Policy

For the Sky Clock app and skyclockapp.com · Last updated 19 September 2026

Who this is from

Sky Clock is made by Eric Rosenbaum, an independent developer, and published on the App Store under the name Sam Harper. In this policy, "we" and "us" mean the developer, and "the app" means Sky Clock for iPhone and iPad.

What the app uses, and why

Your location

With your permission, Sky Clock reads your device location so it can compute which planets, Moon phase and satellite passes are visible from where you are standing. The calculation happens entirely on your phone. The coordinates are never uploaded to us, logged remotely, or shared with anyone.

If you would rather not share your location at all, you can type in a place by hand, and every feature works the same way. The one exception is described under "Weather" below: to fetch a cloud forecast for a place, that place has to be sent to Apple.

Your observation log

If you subscribe to Sky Clock Plus, the sightings you save — the object, the date, the coordinates, and any note or photo you add — are stored on your device and, if you are signed in to iCloud, mirrored to your own private iCloud database. That database belongs to your Apple Account. The developer cannot see it, and neither can anyone else. Deleting the app, or deleting the entries inside it, removes that data.

Notifications

Alerts are scheduled locally on your device from the same calculations the app already performs. There is no push server, and no device token is registered anywhere.

Usage analytics and session recordings

Sky Clock uses PostHog, an analytics service, to record how the app is used: events such as "a screen was opened", "onboarding finished" or "the paywall was shown", and recordings of what happens on screen during a session. This is how the developer finds out which parts of the app confuse people, and it is used for nothing else.

There is no account and no login, so these are not tied to your name or email. PostHog assigns a random identifier to your installation of the app, which lets one visit be told apart from another. It is not your advertising identifier, it is not shared with anyone, and it is never used to follow you into other apps or websites.

Because a recording captures the screen, everything that could identify you is masked on your device before anything is sent: the place name and coordinates you are using, the notes and photos in your observation log, and everything you type. Your location is never attached to an analytics event. Recordings are deleted after 30 days.

There is no crash reporting service and no advertising identifier in the app.

The network requests the app makes

The app makes four kinds of network request and no others.

• Orbital elements, about once a week. A small public text file is downloaded from Celestrak (celestrak.org) so that Space Station pass times stay accurate. The request carries no identifier and nothing about you beyond the ordinary network metadata any web request carries. The file is cached, and the app works offline from the cached copy.
• Space weather, for the aurora. A public planetary K-index forecast is downloaded from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (services.swpc.noaa.gov). It is the same file for everyone, it carries no identifier, and whether the aurora could reach you is worked out on your device from your latitude.
• Weather, if you use the forecast features. The cloud forecast comes from Apple Weather through Apple's WeatherKit. To return a forecast for your location, Apple receives that location. It goes to Apple, not to us; we never see it. Apple states that location data used for weather is not linked to your identity or used to build a profile. See Apple's Privacy Policy. This is the only request that involves where you are, and it is only made when you use the parts of the app that show a cloud forecast.
• Usage analytics, while you use the app. The events and masked screen recordings described above are sent to PostHog (us.i.posthog.com), which stores them for the developer in the United States. They carry the random installation identifier and no location. See PostHog's privacy policy.

Purchases

Subscriptions are handled entirely by Apple through the App Store. Sky Clock never sees your payment details, your name or your billing address. Apple provides the developer with aggregate, anonymous sales reporting, which cannot be traced back to an individual customer.

This website

skyclockapp.com is a set of static pages. It sets no cookies, runs no scripts, embeds no fonts, images or players from other companies, and has no analytics. The company hosting the site keeps standard server logs, which typically include IP addresses and are used only to serve and protect the site.

Data the developer receives

The anonymous usage events and masked session recordings described above, and nothing else. They arrive under a random installation identifier, with no name, email, account or location attached, and the developer has no way to work out who any of them belong to. If you email support, the developer will of course see your email address and whatever you choose to write. Those emails are kept only for as long as it takes to help you, and are never used for marketing.

Your rights

Privacy laws including the GDPR and the CCPA give you the right to see, correct, export and delete the personal data a company holds about you, and the right not to have your data sold. We have never sold or shared personal data, and never will. The analytics described above are anonymous: they are not linked to your name, email or account, so there is normally nothing we could look up on request. If you write to the address below within 30 days of using the app and tell us roughly when you used it, we will do our best to find the matching recordings and delete them. Data that lives on your device or in your iCloud account is under your control: you can delete individual log entries, or remove the app and its iCloud data, at any time.

Children

Sky Clock is rated 4+ and contains nothing objectionable. The anonymous usage analytics described above work the same way for everyone and identify nobody, so nothing personal is collected from a child either. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, at any age.

Changes

If this policy ever changes, the updated version will be published on this page and the date at the top will change. If a change is ever significant enough to matter to you, it will be called out in the app's release notes.

Contact

Eric Rosenbaum
ericrosenbaum77@gmail.com