Solar Beam Privacy Policy

Last updated: 9 November 2026

Solar Beam is made by Midgar Oy, a company registered in Finland. It shows NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, James Webb Space Telescope imagery and near-Earth-object data on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro. This policy applies to all five versions. It is short because the app does very little with data.

No account

Solar Beam has no accounts, no sign-in and no user profiles. It never asks for your name, email address, phone number or location. It contains no code that reads your contacts, photos, calendar, health data, microphone, camera or location. It uses no advertising identifier, does not track you across other apps or websites, and contains no advertising, attribution or crash-reporting SDK. What it does have is an anonymous Midgar ID, described under Your Midgar ID below. Versions before 5.1 also report purchases to RevenueCat, described under Purchases.

What stays on your device

Everything Solar Beam remembers stays on your device. The app never uploads it, with three exceptions: your Midgar ID and purchases, described under Your Midgar ID and Purchases; the week the app was installed, which the anonymous active count carries as described under What leaves your device; and the diagnostic log, which you can send yourself. It keeps:

Deleting Solar Beam deletes what it keeps in its own files and databases. The keychain is different: iOS keeps its items when an app is deleted. Three kinds of item stay there: the start of your Premium Week and the expiry of your purchase, so that Premium is recognised again after a reinstall; this device's Midgar sign-in session; and your Midgar ID, which is also kept in iCloud Keychain (see below). The Midgar ID stays in your keychain and in iCloud Keychain.

What leaves your device

The app makes ordinary internet requests. The requests for pictures, Webb images, asteroids and AI facts attach no identifier to them, so none of those can be linked to you or to a device. The requests that belong to your Midgar ID, to your purchases and to the More Apps screen are described under Your Midgar ID, Purchases and More Apps. As with any website, the server answering a request necessarily sees the IP address the request came from.

Space data: api.midgarcorp.cc, the Midgar gateway, which passes each request to a Cloudflare Worker we operate that relays NASA's APOD and NeoWs data and ESA/Webb's public image archive. Apart from the Sky Archive, a request carries only what you are looking at: a date, a page number, a collection name, or a Webb search term you typed. With the Sky Archive on, the app also asks the gateway, in the background, for the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive a month at a time and for the Webb gallery a page at a time, so those requests carry dates and page numbers that nothing on your screen shows. We do not store IP addresses, and we build no request histories or user records. Cloudflare hosts the service for us. The gateway writes one operational log line for each request, with its request id, method, path, app id and status code, and the reason when an upstream service fails. Those lines hold no headers, request bodies or query strings. Cloudflare also keeps its own records of the requests its platform handles.

Images and video: assets.science.nasa.gov, apod.nasa.gov, cdn.esawebb.org and esawebb.org. Pictures are downloaded directly from NASA and ESA/Webb, so those organisations see the request for the image. Videos that NASA hosts play inside the app and stream from NASA. When the picture of the day is a YouTube video, its thumbnail comes from img.youtube.com. Choosing to play a YouTube or Vimeo video opens it in a browser view, where their own privacy policies apply.

AI facts: api.midgarcorp.cc. When you ask for AI facts about a picture, the app sends NASA's own public title and description of that picture to the Midgar gateway, which passes it to our Cloudflare Worker, which passes it to Anthropic to write the text. Nothing about you is included: no identifier, no device information, and nothing you typed. We do not retain the request; the answer is cached on your device.

More Apps: midgar-catalog.guitaripod.workers.dev and itunes.apple.com. Opening the More Apps screen fetches our list of Midgar apps and asks Apple's public iTunes lookup service for their current icons, prices and ratings; your App Store country code is sent so that prices are correct for your region. On iPhone and iPad, when you tap a Midgar app you do not have, its App Store page opens inside Solar Beam, and Apple receives a campaign token that names Solar Beam's Settings screen, together with a Midgar provider token.

On all five versions, the More Apps screen also reports to api.midgarcorp.cc when it opens, which app tiles were shown and which were tapped, and when another app's App Store page loads or you open that app. This includes Apple TV, where the screen sits in Settings. That report contains no identifier of any kind and not your Midgar ID: only the event, the promoted app's App Store id, your region code, where in the app the screen was opened, and Solar Beam's own name, version and platform. Our server keeps running totals, counted per day, event, app, platform, the app's major and minor version, and the promoted app, placement or product each count names. It also writes one operational log line per request, with its request id, method, path, app id, status and counts of accepted and dropped events. It never logs headers or request bodies. So there is no per-person or per-device record, and none could be reconstructed. This is product-interaction data, used only to decide which of our apps to promote, never for advertising or tracking. You can avoid it entirely by not opening the More Apps screen.

On all five versions, including Apple TV, the app also sends three kinds of anonymous count to api.midgarcorp.cc in the same way: one "active" count the first time you use the app on each day, in each week and in each month, which tells us how many people use it; one count for each purchase that names only the product bought; and one count each time a purchase screen is shown, naming only the place it was shown from, such as Settings, a locked feature, a limit or onboarding. They carry no identifier and are stored only as running totals per day, event, app, platform, the app's major and minor version, and the place in the app or the product the count names. The active count also carries the week the app was first installed on the device, a coarse label shared by everyone who installed that week. They are used only to understand how the app is used, never for advertising or tracking. They are sent whether or not you open the More Apps screen. Midgar may publish aggregate statistics built from anonymous counts, such as weekly active installs, which never identify a person.

Your Midgar ID

Midgar Oy makes a family of apps. So that a purchase is recognised on all your devices and in the other Midgar apps, Solar Beam creates a random Midgar ID the first time it runs. It is a random number: not your name, not your Apple ID, not your device's identifier for advertisers, and it is never used to follow you into another app or website. It is kept in your iCloud Keychain, so your other devices and your other Midgar apps on the same Apple Account find the same one.

Where the device supports Apple's App Attest service, the first time an app creates or joins the ID on a device, that service confirms to us that the request comes from a genuine copy of the app on a genuine device; we receive Apple's attestation and nothing about you. Where the device does not support it, or App Attest fails on it or the attestation is rejected, the ID is created without that check; if Apple's service cannot be reached, no ID is created until a later attempt, which can then be attested. The ID then travels as a sign-in token with the requests to api.midgarcorp.cc that need it: the purchase ledger described under Purchases, and the More Apps screen, which asks our servers which Midgar apps you already use and what you own in them so that it does not suggest an app you already have. On Apple TV that lookup also runs when the screen opens, but its answer is not shown there. Pictures, Webb images, asteroids, AI facts and the anonymous More Apps report never carry it.

Purchases

Solar Beam Premium is sold as a monthly subscription, an annual subscription, or a one-time lifetime purchase. Payment is handled entirely by Apple through the App Store. We never see your payment details.

When you buy or restore Premium, the app sends the App Store transaction Apple has already issued (which product was bought, when, whether it renewed, lapsed or was refunded, and Apple's signed record of it) together with your Midgar ID to the Midgar purchase ledger at api.midgarcorp.cc, and Apple's own server notifications about your subscription reach the same ledger. The ledger keeps these records so that your Premium is recognised on all your devices, so that we can count subscribers, and so that we can work out what a Midgar app should offer you. Whether Premium is unlocked is decided from Apple's StoreKit on your device together with the ledger; when our servers cannot be reached, the last answer the ledger gave this device is kept and combined with StoreKit's, so the purchase still completes and Premium still unlocks; a subscription counts from that answer for up to seven days, and a device with no earlier answer relies on StoreKit alone.

Apple's own server notifications about your subscription reach the same ledger and go no further. Until 6 November 2026 the ledger also passed them on to RevenueCat, a subscription-reporting service acting as our processor, which keeps what it received under its own policy; they carried the same App Store transaction (which product was bought, when, whether it renewed, lapsed or was refunded) and, as Apple's "app account token", your Midgar ID, and never your name, email address or IP address. The app contains no RevenueCat software.

Versions before 5.1 also report each purchase to RevenueCat from the app: it receives the same App Store transaction, together with a random identifier the app generates on your device the first time it runs. That identifier is not your Apple ID and not your device's identifier for advertisers, and no name, email address, or anything you typed or looked at is included. From version 5.1 the app contains no RevenueCat software.

Subscriptions can be managed or cancelled at apps.apple.com/account/subscriptions. Use of the app is governed by Apple's Standard End User License Agreement.

Children

Solar Beam is rated 4+ and is suitable for children. Because the app asks for no personal data from anyone, it asks for none from children. We do not knowingly gather information from children under 13, or under the equivalent age in your country, and the app contains nothing that would allow us to.

Your rights under the GDPR and similar laws

Midgar Oy is the data controller. Apart from the Midgar ID and the purchase records tied to it, described above, we hold no personal data about you, so there is little to access, correct, export, restrict or erase.

We also process the technical data any server sees in order to answer a request, principally your IP address. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in delivering the content you asked for and keeping the service available. It is not stored for analysis, profiling or advertising. The per-app counters described above are aggregate statistics and are not personal data. The Midgar ID and the purchase records are processed to run and account for what you bought and to recognise it across your devices and Midgar apps.

Processing takes place in the European Union and the United States, by Cloudflare as our hosting provider, by Anthropic for AI facts only, and by RevenueCat, Inc. in the United States for the purchase records of versions before 5.1 and the notifications it received until 6 November 2026. To have your Midgar ID and the purchase records tied to it erased, write to us with the product and date of one purchase and we will find and erase them; deleting the app does not remove records we already hold. If you believe we hold data about you, write to us and we will check. You also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority; in Finland this is the Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version is published at midgarcorp.cc/solarbeam/privacy with a new date at the top. Material changes will also be noted in the app's release notes.

Contact

Email marcus@midgarcorp.cc.
Midgar Oy, Finland.