Solander Privacy Policy

1. Who this policy is for

This policy covers the Solander iPhone app. Our website is covered separately by the Mirentha privacy policy.

Solander is published by Mirentha Ltd (“Mirentha”, “we”, “us”), a company incorporated in England and Wales (company number 17207914), registered office 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ. For anything in this policy, contact [email protected].

2. What Solander collects

Nothing. Solander does not ask you to create an account, does not ask for your name, email address or phone number, and contains no analytics, attribution, advertising or crash-reporting SDK of any kind. No data reaches us from the app, so we process no personal data in connection with your use of it. In particular, we never receive your location.

One thing worth explaining before you notice it yourself: the App Store listing declares “Data Not Linked to You: Precise Location”. That is not a contradiction of the paragraph above. Apple's label describes every coordinate that leaves the device for any reason, including the ones sent to Apple's own weather and map services to answer the question you just asked. We declare it because it does leave the phone. It is not linked to you, it is not used to track you, it is used for nothing but making the app work, and none of it comes to us. We would rather over-declare on the label and explain it here than have you find the two pages disagreeing.

3. What happens on your device

Almost all of the app is arithmetic, and all of that arithmetic runs on your iPhone:

The astronomy. Sunrise, sunset, golden hour, blue hour, the twilight boundaries, moonrise, moonset, the moon's phase and illumination, and the positions the Map and Live tabs draw are all computed locally from the coordinate and the date. Nothing about that calculation leaves the device, and it works with no signal at all.

Your location. Used to know which point on the earth to compute for, and to ask for a forecast for that point. It is held on the device. The only places it goes are Apple's weather and mapping services, described in sections 6 and 7.

The camera, on the Live tab only. Frames from the rear camera are drawn to the screen with the sun, moon and stars overlaid on them, in real time, and the app reads their brightness on the device to find the sun, or the moon at night, in the picture and line the drawn sky up with it. They are not recorded, not saved to your photo library, not stored by the app and not transmitted anywhere, and nothing of a frame is kept once it has been drawn. The other five tabs never open the camera.

Motion and orientation, on the Live tab only. Read from the device's own sensors so the overlay knows which way the phone is pointing. The readings are used for the frame in front of you and then discarded. The one thing kept is the alignment the app settles on — a single angle, set by the sun, the moon or your finger — so the sky is still lined up the next time you open Live.

4. What the app keeps on your phone

Solander saves the things you would expect a planning app to save: the spot you are planning for, the shoots and trips you create (with what you have packed for each), what is on your Kit shelves and the calculators’ last settings, your choices in Settings, such as the appearance and the Lock Screen countdown, and the cloud figures from the last forecast it fetched, for the home-screen widgets to draw. It also keeps your subscription’s plan and end date as Apple last reported them, so the app opens without signal while you are subscribed, and a count of the shoots you have saved outside a trip, with the version of the app that last asked Apple to show its rating prompt, so that it asks no more than once a version and never before your third.

All of it is held in the app's private storage on your device. None of it is sent to us or to anyone else, there is no account behind it, and there is no iCloud sync between your devices. Deleting the app removes the lot, and reinstalling starts you empty. Like any app's files, what is saved on the phone is included in your normal iPhone backup — that is Apple's backup of your own device, not a sync we operate or can see.

The home-screen widgets. So a widget can draw without opening the app, Solander writes a small shared file the widgets can read. It holds only the current spot's coordinate, its short name and time zone, and the cloud percentages already fetched for it. Your shoots, trips and kit are not in it and the widgets cannot see them. It stays on the phone.

The Lock Screen countdown. When a shooting window is running, the app can show a live countdown on your Lock Screen. It is drawn from what is already on the phone. There are no push notifications behind it, no token is registered, and nothing about it reaches a server.

Exporting and importing your shoots. Settings › Your shoots › Export as a file… writes everything on the Shoots page into a single file and hands it to the iOS share sheet. That file does contain the places, coordinates and times of your shoots and trips, and what you have packed for each, which is the point of it, so treat it the way you would any file of your own. It is created only when you pick somewhere to send it, it goes only where you send it, and no copy comes to us. Import a file… reads such a file back in: you choose the file, the app adds the shoots and trips it holds, and nothing about that file leaves the phone.

5. Permissions the app asks for

Location, while using the app. Requested so the app can compute the sun and moon for where you are and fetch the forecast for that spot. Solander never asks for background or always-on location, and it never reads your position while it is closed. You can decline and still use the whole app: set the pin yourself on the Map tab and everything retunes to it.

Camera. Requested the first time you open the Live tab, and used only there. Decline it and the other five tabs are unaffected.

Motion and orientation are used by the Live tab to know which way the phone is pointing. iOS does not put a separate permission behind them for the way the app reads them, so there is no extra prompt — they come with the camera view and are covered in section 3.

Solander asks for no other permissions. It does not request access to your photo library, contacts, microphone, health data or notifications, and it sends no notifications of any kind. Either permission can be changed at any time in Settings › Solander.

6. The forecast, and where your coordinate goes

To draw the cloud line on the dial, Solander asks Apple WeatherKit for a cloud-cover forecast. The request carries the coordinate you are planning for and nothing else: no name, no account, no device identifier we add, and nothing about your spots, shoots or trips. It is the main reason Solander needs a connection at all; the others are Apple's map, search and place lookups and the App Store's subscription check (section 7), and one public space-weather feed that carries no coordinate. Nothing else the app does goes over the network, and every one of those requests goes to Apple or to that public feed — never to us.

That exchange is between your device and Apple, and Apple's weather privacy terms apply to it. Apple states that it does not associate WeatherKit requests with a user's identity. The app carries the Weather attribution Apple requires, linking to Apple's weather attribution, and the data sources listed there are Apple's rather than ours.

The forecast that comes back is kept in the app's memory, not on disk, and its cloud figures are copied into the widgets' shared file (section 4) so a widget can draw them without the app until they are six hours old; after that the widgets draw the sun, the moon and the dark alone. Until you grant location or set a pin of your own, forecasts are requested for the app's built-in demonstration spot — Durdle Door in Dorset — never for where you actually are, which the app does not know.

Nothing is fetched while the app is closed. Solander fetches no forecast, reads no location and sends no notification while you are not using it. The home-screen widgets work out the sun, the moon and the dark on the phone, for the spot the app last saved, and draw the cloud figures it last saved; the Lock Screen countdown counts down to a window you chose to follow. Neither fetches anything. Forecasts are also fetched sparingly while the app is open — one request per spot, shared by every screen that needs it, and reused for half an hour unless you pull to refresh.

7. Third parties

Solander contains no third-party analytics, advertising or tracking SDKs. Two other parties, Apple and NOAA, are involved in running it, and neither receives anything about you from us.

Apple. Beyond WeatherKit, Apple operates the App Store and takes the payment for the subscription, and Apple's StoreKit tells the app whether your subscription is active. That exchange happens between your device and Apple and carries nothing about your planning. Every purchase is made with Apple: we never see your payment details, and Apple gives us only its sales and subscription reports, which don't tell us who you are. If you have opted in to sharing analytics with developers, Apple may give us anonymised, aggregated statistics such as crash counts and device types; that data comes from Apple, which states that it does not identify you personally, and is governed by Apple's privacy policy.

Apple Maps. The map on the Map tab is Apple's, drawn by MapKit, the mapping framework built into iOS. Displaying it means your device requests map imagery for the area you are looking at, which is a request to Apple in the same way the forecast is. Other requests go the same way. Searching for a place sends what you typed and a 30 km square centred on your spot, and Find photo spots in this area sends eight category searches (viewpoint, beach, lighthouse and the like) for that same square; a trip’s destination search sends what you typed and a 600 km square. And whenever the app reads your own position (Use my location, for one), it sends it to be turned into a place name. A pin you drop on the map is never looked up: it is called Map pin, with its coordinates. Apple operates MapKit under its own privacy terms, which state that it does not associate map requests with an Apple Account. The map is only ever a backdrop for the pin: nothing about your spots, shoots or trips is sent with it, and none of it reaches us. The one hand-off is a saved shoot's Route button, which passes that spot's name and coordinate to the Apple Maps app for directions when you tap it.

NOAA. For the aurora watch, the app fetches the planetary storm forecast (the Kp index) published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center. It is one global bulletin, the same for everyone: the request carries no coordinate, no identifier and nothing about you — the app simply reads a public feed, the way a browser would.

The map and the weather are Apple services on Apple's terms; the NOAA feed is a public government bulletin. There is no other provider in the app, and no Mirentha server anywhere in it.

8. Children

Solander is not directed at children and collects no data from anyone, including children.

9. Your rights

UK GDPR gives you rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection over personal data held about you by a controller. We are not a controller of any personal data through this app, for the plain reason that none reaches us: we hold no record of you, your location, your spots or your shoots, and there is nothing here for you to access, correct, export or have erased. We would rather say that than list rights we could not act on.

Everything the app holds is on your phone and under your control. Deleting the app removes it, and the permissions in section 5 can be withdrawn at any time in Settings.

If you write to us about Solander, with the form on the support page or by email, we hold your message and address in order to reply, on the basis of our legitimate interest in answering support enquiries; that is covered by the Mirentha privacy policy. You can ask us to delete the correspondence at any time at [email protected], and you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

10. Changes to this policy

If a future version of Solander ever collects anything, this policy will be updated before that version ships and the change will be described here rather than buried in a version number. The date at the top always reflects the current text.

11. Contact

Mirentha Ltd, 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. Privacy questions: [email protected]. For help using the app, write to us with the form on the Solander support page.