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Four things, top to bottom. The meta row - the place, its coordinates and the date. The headline - how long until the next golden hour, or how much of the current one is left. The arc - the sun's path across the sky today, with the light bands shaded along it and a marker where the sun is right now. And the times list - eight rows, first light to last light.

That is the entire app. There are no tabs, no menus and no settings screen.

Each one is a range of solar elevation, measured from the horizon:

• Twilight - −18° to −6°, the deep blue-grey at each end of the day
• Blue hour - −6° to −4°
• Golden hour - −4° to +6°, with sunrise and sunset sitting inside it
• Daylight - everything above +6°

The dashed horizontal line is the horizon, at −0.833°. The arc crosses it exactly at sunrise and at sunset.

Because its height is the sun's real elevation, on a fixed scale. A June arc genuinely towers over a December one, and an arc in Quito reaches almost to the top of the frame while one in Tromsø barely lifts off the bottom. That difference is the point - it is the seasonal signal, and normalising it away would erase it.

The apex is solar noon - the moment the sun is actually highest - not twelve o'clock on the clock. In Britain in June the two are about 66 minutes apart, thanks to British Summer Time, your longitude within the time zone, and the equation of time. The clock is a convention; the sun is not.

In order: first light, blue hour, sunrise, golden hour ends, golden hour, sunset, blue hour, last light. The list runs chronologically, so the first "blue hour" is the morning one and the second is the evening one - the position in the list tells you which.

"Golden hour ends" is the morning band closing; "Golden hour" further down is the evening one opening.

One of four things, depending on where the sun is: in 47 minutes before the next golden hour, for 23 more minutes while you're in one, tomorrow at 05:11 after the day's last one, or not today if none occurs today or tomorrow.

Under 90 minutes it counts in minutes, rounded up and never below one. Above that it decomposes into hours and minutes - in 7h 23m - rather than rounding, so the number never jumps backwards as the clock runs down.

Yes. The sun marker and the headline countdown refresh every minute, and again the moment you bring the app back to the foreground. If you leave it open across midnight it rolls over to the new day by itself.

Sunrise, golden hour and twilight all depend on where you are. Gild asks for while using the app access at kilometre-level accuracy - deliberately coarse, because that is as precise as sunrise gets. It shows you an explanation before the system prompt appears, and the button says "Continue", not "Allow".

No. The search glyph is on that screen too - tap it, search for a city, and Gild shows that city's light instead. The screen also offers a shortcut into iOS Settings if you change your mind.

Tap the magnifying glass in the top right and start typing. Suggestions appear as you go; tap one and the whole screen switches to that place - its arc, its times, its date, on its own clock. Auckland viewed from London shows Auckland's date, which is usually tomorrow's.

Tap the place name in the top-left of the meta row. Chosen places are session-scoped anyway, so quitting and reopening the app also returns you to your own location.

Not in this version. Gild stores nothing at all, and saved locations would be the first thing it ever wrote to disk. They're on the list for a future update, alongside widgets and viewing a future date.

Gild's search returns towns and cities, not roads or businesses - a street has no light of its own to show. If a search comes back empty, try the nearest town or city name.

You may also see "We can't work out the local time there." That means the place resolved, but Apple's Maps data carried no time zone for it. Gild refuses rather than guessing a clock, because a plausible-looking screen on the wrong time zone is worse than no screen. The nearest town usually works.

No - search needs a connection, and so does the place name above the arc. Everything else does not: the arc, the bands, the marker and all eight times are computed on the device and work perfectly in aeroplane mode.

No - a dash means that boundary genuinely does not happen on that day, at that place. The row stays in the list rather than disappearing, so the rhythm of the list never changes and you can see exactly what is missing.

This isn't only a polar thing. Southampton has no astronomical dawn or dusk from roughly mid-May to late July, because the sun never drops to −18°. Those two rows show dashes for about a third of the year.

On a day when the sun never sets, the arc simply never crosses the horizon line. On a day when it never rises, it stays below it. Neither is a special mode - it falls out of the geometry, because the arc's height is the sun's elevation.

Tromsø on 21 June has no sunrise and no sunset, but it still has a golden hour, and Gild says so. Tromsø on 21 December has no sunrise but does have a blue hour. Reykjavík on 21 June has both a sunrise and a sunset but no blue hour at all.

Both are right, and this can only happen far north or far south. The list row is a crossing time - the moment the sun passes +6° - and on a day the sun never rises that crossing never happens. The headline asks a different question: is the sun inside the −4° to +6° band right now? On Tromsø's December days the sun peaks around −3.4°, which is inside the golden band, so it is genuinely golden hour with no crossing to name.

They are computed on your phone from NOAA's solar position equations - nothing is downloaded and there is no forecast involved. The engine is checked against published tables from the US Naval Observatory and NOAA, plus JPL Horizons for the underlying solar declination, at twelve locations from Quito to Tromsø, including two daylight-saving transition dates.

Within about two minutes of the published tables, with one honest exception: at high latitude near a solstice the sun approaches the horizon so slowly that a hundredth of a degree moves the crossing time by many minutes. That is geometry rather than a defect, and no method avoids it - Reykjavík's June sunrise and sunset are the two cases where the tolerance is deliberately wider.

Likely differences in the horizon convention. Gild uses −0.833° for sunrise and sunset - the standard figure that accounts for atmospheric refraction and the sun's own radius - and does not correct for your elevation above sea level or for hills on the skyline. On a mountain or in a valley the real sunrise you see can differ by several minutes from the geometric one any app computes.

No. Gild contains no weather data of any kind. It tells you when the light changes, not what the sky will be doing.

There aren't any, and that's deliberate. Everything Gild could have offered a switch for, iOS already has one for: appearance and clock format both follow your system settings.

Gild follows your iPhone's appearance setting - Settings > Display & Brightness. The light appearance was designed first, because the app is meant to be used outdoors in daylight in the hour before sunset, and a dark screen at full brightness in direct sun is the hardest thing to read. The dark one is a separate palette rather than an inversion.

Gild follows your region's convention, from Settings > General > Language & Region. Turn 24-Hour Time on or off there and the times list follows. When you're on a 12-hour format the AM/PM marker sits outside the aligned column, so the times still line up on the colon.

Not yet - this version is iPhone only, in portrait. A lock screen and home screen widget is the most-wanted addition and is first on the list for a future update, along with viewing a future date and saved locations.

iOS 18 or later, on iPhone.

Nothing. It's free, with no adverts, no subscription and no in-app purchases. There is no free tier to outgrow and nothing held back behind a paywall - what you install is the whole app.

Not quite - version 1.0 is finished and awaiting release. This page and the privacy policy are part of what goes into the listing.

Nothing. There is no account, no server of ours, no database, no cache, no log file and no saved locations. Every screen is computed from your coordinates and the date, then forgotten when you close the app.

Two things, both to Apple and both named on the screen that asks for permission:

• Your approximate coordinates, sent to Apple to look up the name of the place you are in
• Whatever you type when you search for a city

Nothing else, and nothing is stored. There are no analytics, no tracking and no third-party code of any kind in the app. Full detail is in the privacy policy.

Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Gild. The app carries on working - search for a city and it shows that city's light instead.

There's nothing to delete. Gild writes nothing to your device and sends nothing to us. Deleting the app removes the app.