Support

No. There is no sign-up, no login, and no password. Every feature is available the moment you open the app.

No — location access is optional. If you grant it, Open Skies shows conditions for where you are and can find the best nearby spots. If you'd rather not, search for any location by name instead and the app works the same way.

You can change this any time in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Open Skies.

Open Skies is an iPhone app and is designed for portrait orientation. It will run on an iPad in iPhone compatibility mode, but there is no iPad-native layout yet.

Each hour is scored from 0 to 100 for the photography mode you've selected. The score combines cloud cover, wind and gusts, precipitation, visibility, humidity, sun angle, and moon conditions — weighted differently per mode.

Heavy overcast, for example, pushes a portrait score up and a landscape score down. Still air matters enormously for macro and barely at all for street.

Many apps treat golden hour as a fixed number of minutes around sunset. Open Skies computes it from the actual sun position at your exact coordinates, so the window changes with your latitude and the time of year — it can be far longer in northern summer than a fixed offset would suggest. Blue hour and astronomical darkness are derived the same way.

Open Skies has no backend of its own. It pulls from public sources:

• Open-Meteo — weather forecasts, air quality (haze and wildfire smoke), and location search.
• Geoapify / OpenStreetMap — nearby photography locations.
• US National Weather Service — active severe-weather alerts.

Place names and the Locations map are handled by Apple's on-device services.

Alerts come from the US National Weather Service, so they're only available for locations in the United States. Everywhere else, the alerts section simply stays empty. An empty section in the US means there are no active warnings for that location right now.

Reminders are scheduled locally on your device. A few things to check:

• Notifications are allowed in iOS Settings → Notifications → Open Skies.
• Focus or Do Not Disturb isn't silencing them.
• The location you expect a reminder for is saved in the app.

Reminders only fire when top-tier conditions are actually forecast, so a quiet stretch of weather means a quiet phone. If everything above checks out and you still get nothing, email me.

The app needs a network connection to fetch a forecast. If you're online and it still fails, the upstream weather service may be briefly unavailable — pull to refresh in a minute or two. If it persists, send me the location you were trying to load.

Subscriptions are billed by Apple, not by me, and are managed on your device: Settings → your name → Subscriptions. Cancelling there stops future renewals and keeps your access until the end of the paid period.

If you've reinstalled the app or moved to a new iPhone, use Restore Purchases in the app to bring your subscription back.

Refunds are handled entirely by Apple. Request one at reportaproblem.apple.com with the Apple Account you purchased on. I have no access to payment details and can't issue refunds directly — but do tell me what went wrong so I can fix it.

Everything the app stores — saved locations, preferences, scheduled reminders — lives on your device only. Deleting the app removes all of it. There is no server-side account to close, because there is no server.

Send it over. Open Skies is actively developed and requests from photographers who actually use it shape what gets built next.