SunsetCrew

Join the beta

SunsetCrew is in private testing on the iPhone right now. It opens in the United States first, and in other places soon — so put your name down wherever you live. We’ll have you join the crew as soon as we can.

Write to [email protected] and say roughly where you watch from.

Currently in closed beta. Get added to the crew

How it works

• Save the place you want watched. Home, usually. It never knows your exact location — just a big square around you so we can make an accurate prediction.
• Choose how much warning you want before sunset — half an hour, forty-five minutes, or a full hour before the sun goes down.
• Choose how often you want to hear from it: every sunset you could catch, or only the evenings that are genuinely out of the ordinary.

There is no account, no sign-up, and no password. It never learns your name, there is no advertising, and nothing in it reports what you do. The privacy page explains exactly what leaves your phone, which is very little.

We don’t think you should have to trade off your privacy for catching a peaceful sunset.

Why I made this

Sunset happens every evening, for free. And I was missing almost all of them — and there’s no getting any back. I didn’t miss them from indifference but because I’m juggling too many plates and it’s a moving target. Sunset lands at a different time every night, it is on no calendar, and there is no reason to look up at 7:14 on a Tuesday. By the time you remember, it is gone. I just wanted a quiet, beautiful nudge, every day.

SunsetCrew watches the sky where you are and gently reminds you to grab that sunset. It does it with enough warning to get out the door, and only speaks on evenings where you can see it. Any evening the sun is going to come through, it’s there. If you want it to be even quieter, it will only tell you about the truly spectacular ones.

To know what is coming, I pull in some of the best weather data in the world, and run it through a custom algorithm to tell you what may come.

Someone once told me only a fool or a newcomer tries to predict the weather — let alone what a specific viewpoint will see in a brief time window — but the app does a surprisingly good job already and I’m adding data and tweaking things to make it better every single day. You can help by joining the beta.

It stays quiet

On an evening with nothing to see, it says nothing. There is no daily update, no summary of a sky you already looked at, and nothing waiting to be opened. Never more than one message in a day. It is made to never get in the way. Ever.

You may go for stretches without hearing from it. That is not the app forgetting about you — it is the app keeping its side of the deal.