Sunplot: Sun Hours

Trace the roofs and trees around a bed with your camera, and find out how many hours of real sunlight it gets — today and across the whole year.

Every seed packet says "full sun" or "part shade". Almost nobody knows which one their own garden is.

Sunplot answers it with a number. Stand where the bed is, hold the phone up, and trace the roofs and trees around you with a finger. Then it walks the whole day a minute at a time and counts only the light that actually reaches that spot.

WHY THE ANSWER IS DIFFERENT

Other sun apps show you where the sun is. That is the easy half. The half that decides the answer is what stands in the way — the fence, the garage, the lime tree next door. Sunplot measures that skyline with the camera and subtracts it. A bed under open sky and the same bed behind a two-storey terrace are not the same bed, and the number knows it.

FREE

• Today's hours of direct sun at a spot, and what that means: full sun, part sun, part shade, full shade • What will grow there — 42 plants sorted into will do well, will manage, and too much sun • The map: where the sun arrives from, where it leaves, and where it is right now, with a slider through the day • The sky view: the sun's path drawn over the camera, and the skyline tracing that makes the answer real

ONE PAYMENT UNLOCKS

• The whole year at a spot — when full sun starts and ends, and the weeks it gets none at all • As many spots as you like — the bed by the fence and the bed by the garage answer differently • Which is better? Every spot side by side, ranked • A word before the sun arrives, so a short winter afternoon is not missed • The home screen widget

One payment. No subscription, nothing renews, nothing to cancel.

HONEST ABOUT WHAT IT KNOWS

The compass in a phone can be badly wrong, and most sun apps draw a confident line anyway. Sunplot says so on screen when it does not trust its own reading. Before you have traced anything it labels the figure as open sky — the most the spot could get — instead of pretending to know.

It is a gardening and planning tool, not a survey instrument. Check anything expensive against a professional measurement.

YOUR SPOTS NEVER LEAVE THE PHONE

No account, no sign-up, no analytics, no ads. Your location, your spots and the skylines you trace are worked out on the device and stay there. The only things sent anywhere are the record of your purchase and, once, an anonymous code from Apple that says whether one of our ads brought you here. It works with no signal at all.

GOOD FOR

Vegetable beds, borders and allotments. Balconies and window boxes. Greenhouses and cold frames. Roof pitches for solar panels. Working out which corner will take a shade planting, and which window a houseplant will survive.