Last updated: 20 October 2026
Starlapse has no account. Your photographs, your location and the direction you point the phone stay on it, unless you choose to join the sky dataset, and then only in the coarsened form described below. Every network request the app makes is listed here, and each one except the purchase can be switched off.
That is unusual enough for a camera app that the rest of this document exists mainly to be specific about it.
Camera. To photograph the night sky. Frames are combined on your device — that is the entire product — and the result is written to your photo library only when you tap Save. Nothing is uploaded unless you join the sky dataset (below), and nothing is kept outside your photo library and the app’s temporary folder.
Location, while the app is open. Used to compute where things are in the sky above you: which meteor showers are active, where their radiants sit, where the Moon is, and therefore where to point the camera. The calculation runs entirely on your device using published astronomical formulas. Your position is not sent anywhere, except rounded to 0.1° (about 10 km) with a sky dataset contribution if you join it, and it is not stored on disk. Deny it and everything still works except the aiming overlay.
Motion sensors. The gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer tell the app which way the camera is aimed, so the sky overlay lines up with what you see. The raw readings never leave the device; a sky dataset contribution carries only the direction the photo was taken in.
Photo library, add-only. Used to save your finished photographs and videos. The app requests add-only access, which means it can put pictures in your library but cannot read, browse or scan what is already there.
Notifications, if you allow them. Reminders on the evening of a good meteor night from where you are. They are worked out on your device from the same forecast the app shows and scheduled with iOS as local notifications: nothing is sent to us or anyone else to make them, and no push service is involved. Switch them off in Settings › SHOWER ALERTS, or in the iOS Settings app.
Purchases. Starlapse Pro is bought through Apple’s App Store. The request goes to Apple and is governed by Apple’s privacy policy; the app sees only whether this phone owns Pro.
A usage counter. Five events, so we know whether anyone opens the app and comes back: app opened, capture started (with the mode: still, time-lapse or detector), capture saved (with the frame count), Pro page shown, Pro bought. They go to our own server at analytics.superduperai.co, not to a third party. Each event carries the app version, the platform and a random identifier generated on this phone when the counter first runs. That identifier is not your Apple ID, not the advertising identifier, not shared between apps, and is deleted with the app. No photos, no location, no heading, no name.
You can switch the counter off in the controls panel, under Usage counter. Off means nothing is sent, including events already waiting to be sent.
The sky dataset, if you join it. Every stack measures how dark the sky is from the stars in it. If you choose to contribute (the app asks once, after your first saved photo, and the answer can be changed in Settings › SKY DATASET), each saved stack sends: that sky reading (brightness in magnitudes per square arcsecond, the naked-eye limit, the Bortle class, the direction the camera pointed in whole degrees, and the stars it was measured from: each one’s catalogue magnitude and colour, its measured brightness and the sky around it, and its height in whole degrees), the camera settings (lens, ISO, shutter, frame count, field of view, iPhone model), a 2048-pixel JPEG of the photo, the time it was taken, your location rounded to 0.1° (about 10 km), the app version and a random contributor identifier made on this phone (not the usage counter’s, not your Apple ID; it is kept in the iOS Keychain so a later delete still reaches it after a reinstall). Directions are rounded to whole degrees on purpose: the height of known stars at a known time pins down where on Earth they were seen, and whole degrees keep that to about 100 km, coarser than the rounded location itself. A detector session sends the meteors it placed on the sky (time, start and end direction, length, the shower they belong to), without the video clips.
It goes to our own server at api.starlapse.app, and from there into an open scientific dataset, published under CC BY 4.0 (on Zenodo, Hugging Face and GitHub) so anyone can study light pollution and meteor activity with it. The published copy carries no contributor identifier at all, only a one-way code that groups one phone’s readings together; nothing in it names you. Delete everything I contributed in Settings › SKY DATASET erases every reading and photo sent from this phone, on the server, at once, and keeps them out of every later release. Copies already downloaded from an earlier release cannot be recalled; that is what open data means, and why the location in it is coarse.
Crash reports are kept on the phone and sent only when you tap Send in the controls panel. They contain the camera’s error message and the code path, never a photo or a location.
Finished photographs and time-lapses go to your photo library, under your control, and are governed from that point by Apple’s Photos privacy settings rather than by this app.
Event clips from detector mode are written to the app’s temporary folder first, so you can review them before deciding. Anything you discard is deleted; anything you keep is copied to your photo library. Uninstalling the app removes everything left in its temporary folder.
Starlapse is not directed at children. It collects nothing that identifies a person; the sky dataset, if joined, holds coarse locations and sky photos under a random identifier.
If this policy ever changes, the updated version will appear at this address with a new date at the top. The full revision history is public in the repository — you can see exactly what changed and when.
Questions: info@superduperai.co
Source code: github.com/fortunto2/starlapse — MIT licensed, so the claims above are verifiable rather than merely asserted.