Sextant privacy policy
Short version: Sextant collects nothing. No account, no analytics, no ads, no tracking. Your location never leaves your phone.
Location
If you allow it, Sextant reads your approximate location to work out which stars, planets and satellites are above you. It's used only on your phone, is not stored anywhere but your phone's own settings, and is never sent to us or anyone else. Without permission, Sextant guesses from your time zone instead, or (from version 1.2) you can type in a latitude and longitude, which are kept on your phone and nowhere else.
Motion
Point mode uses the phone's motion sensors to tell which way it's aimed. That stays on the phone too.
Alerts
From version 1.2, if you turn on alerts, Sextant schedules them as local notifications on your phone. It works out the times itself, from the satellite and comet orbits it has already downloaded and the location it last had, and keeps that location on your phone so it can re-plan in the background. No alert, and nothing about what you've starred, is sent to us or anyone else. There is no push server.
The network
Sextant downloads satellite orbit data from CelesTrak, a public source run by Dr. T.S. Kelso, about twice a day, and (from version 1.1) comet orbits from the IAU Minor Planet Center about once a week. Those requests carry nothing about you: no location, no identifiers. Like any web request, each server sees the IP address it came from; their own policies cover that. Sextant contacts no other server.
What's stored
Your settings (night mode, constellation lines and so on), your recent searches, anything you've starred, and the downloaded orbits, on your phone only. Deleting the app deletes them.
Children
Sextant collects no information from anyone, children included.
Changes and contact
If this ever changes, this page changes first, with a new date. Questions: support@ducktyping.dev.
Last updated 2026-11-10.