Deconstruct Sun Support

It tells you how many hours of direct sunlight a specific spot receives, today and at the solstices and equinoxes. You mark the buildings and trees on the horizon (an “obstruction skyline”), and the app steps through the day in five-minute increments, checking the sun against your skyline, to add up the sunny minutes.

Create a site (set its location from the map or your device), then drag on the sky chart to paint in the buildings, trees and fences around it. The direct-sun totals update as you go. Tap the date chips to see how the same spot changes across the seasons.

A project groups the sites for one property or client. Open a project to add sites to it or assign several existing sites at once, and (with Pro) export one combined PDF covering every site, with a table comparing their direct-sun hours.

A new sweep replaces the previous one: the old sweep’s photos are deleted so a site doesn’t pile up stale shots of the same sky. Photos you took with Single photo, or imported from your library, are never removed automatically.

No. The sun’s position is computed on your device from published astronomical formulas, and hardiness zones come from data stored in the app, so everything works offline.

They’re the labels on plant tags, in direct-sun hours: full sun 6+ hours, part sun 4–6, part shade 2–4, full shade under 2.

They’re geometric estimates from the skyline you trace and the sun’s real path for your location and date. Real sunlight also shifts with terrain, weather, haze, reflected light and seasonal foliage, so treat the results as a solid planning aid, not a guarantee.

If you traced the skyline in summer with the trees in leaf, the app assumes the same leaf cover all year, so it overestimates winter shade. Deciduous trees drop their leaves, so a bed shaded by a leafy maple in July can sit in real sun by December. For winter-critical plantings, trace a second skyline with the branches bare, or read the leafy result as your shadiest case.

Hold the phone upright for a moment and it will lock on. It needs one good compass reading first, and the compass is only trustworthy when the phone is roughly vertical. Once locked you can aim anywhere. If it won’t settle, step away from cars, metal railings and wiring.

Aim is how far up or down you’re pointing; the app tells you to aim higher or lower to frame the sun’s path. Rotated means the phone is twisted sideways; hold it flat in portrait so the photo lines up with the sky.

Zones are read from a grid about 2 km across. When neighboring cells are a different zone, the app says so rather than claiming more precision than the data has. Local conditions such as slope, cold air pockets and nearby buildings matter at that scale.

Photo tracing (camera or library), guided sun-arc capture with the live overlay, the full-year seasonal breakdown, the photo-real composite and landscape trace view, branded PDF export, and the combined project PDF.

No. Pro is a one-time purchase of $11.99 (US). Buy it once and it stays unlocked on your Apple account.

Open the upgrade screen and tap Restore Purchases while signed in with the Apple ID you bought it with. The app also re-checks your purchase each time it launches.

App Store purchases are refunded by Apple. Request one at reportaproblem.apple.com. If something in the app made you want a refund, please email me too. I’d like to fix it.

It stays on your device. Sites, coordinates, skylines and photos are stored locally and never uploaded. There are no accounts, ads, analytics or tracking. Details are in the privacy policy.

Each is optional and used only on your device: location to fill in a site’s coordinates when you ask, camera and photos for the backdrops you trace over, and motion to level the camera against the horizon while capturing.