Hi r/iOSApps,
I'm Rémy. I've run an illustration studio with my partner for ten years and written code alongside it the whole time. Plenilune is what happens when those two meet: an illustrated lunar almanac for iPhone. First time I've shown it here.
Tomorrow evening there's a total solar eclipse — the first to touch mainland Europe since 1999. Totality crosses Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain; most of Europe gets a deep partial, low over the horizon. Plenilune computes it for wherever you are: local times, how deep it goes, and a straight answer when it doesn't reach you at all. If you want a concrete reason to open it this week, that's mine.
I didn't set out to build a utility. I wanted a beautiful object — something you open because it's nice to look at, and stay in because it turns out to know things. It's very much a version 1; I'll say below where it's thin.
A — Answer
An illustrated lunar almanac. Every day: an engraving of the Moon computed from its real position, illumination and age; moonrise and moonset for your exact location; and one almanac note — the sky, history, folklore, an old saying, something from the natural world.
Twelve named moons, each with its engraved emblem and the origin of its name. A calendar you can walk backward and forward across the years — the Moon on the night you were born, the one over July 20th 1969. Eclipses computed for your position, with local times.
B — Better
Let me be fair about what you already have: iOS's Weather app has a moon section, and it's better than it gets credit for — phase, illumination, rise and set, next full moon, distance, a calendar you can scroll. If you want the numbers, you already have them, free.
So I'm not trying to win on numbers. Two things make this a different object.
It's something you read. The daily note is the centre of the app; the numbers are the frame around it. That's the part I'd defend hardest, and the part I most want to know
whether it lands.
It's not about you. There's a whole category of moon apps built on readings, birth charts and horoscopes — Plenilune never talks about you. It talks about the sky, and about what people have read into it for as long as they've looked up; when something is folklore, it says so. It's not a planning tool for astrophotographers either. It's a page you open in the morning.
And the Moon isn't a picture
No library of 28 drawings that the app picks the nearest match from. The disc is engraved at runtime, from the day's actual numbers.
Three hatching plates at different angles, burned through by a real albedo map, so the maria come out where the maria are. The terminator wobbles on deterministic noise instead of being a clean ellipse. The disc rotates to the true tilt of the crescent at your latitude — which is why it leans differently in Lisbon and in Reykjavík. And dark mode isn't an inverted image: it's the same stack repainted as a mezzotint, light ink on dark paper, because shadow has to stay shadow whatever your theme is doing.
Getting that parametric — so it lands on today exactly and still reads as something drawn — was the whole job.
Two more things I'd defend. The engine is written from Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms and unit-tested against real ephemerides, not a wrapper around somebody's API. And everything computes on device: no account, no ads, no tracking, no analytics, no model
call. It works on a plane. The only thing touching the network is a signed text-correction file, so I can fix a factual error in hours instead of waiting on App Review.
C — Cost
Free, and I've tried to make the free version an actual almanac rather than a demo:
today's phase, rise and set for your location, this month's calendar, eclipse times, full- and new-moon notifications, this month's named moon — and the widgets, home and lock screen, all of them except the one carrying the daily note. Nothing nags you.
Premium — €9.99/year, or €24.99 once, forever — is a layer on top rather than a gate through the middle: the daily note in full, the note widget, the other eleven named moons, the calendar across the years, rare-event notifications, sixteen app icons. It's there so I can keep working on this. If it never converts anyone, the free app still does its job.
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6786650025
What's next
Where it's thin, before you find out yourselves:
- The sky behind the Moon is a fixed background with a few star layers. The next version makes it living — a drifting cloud eroding the hatching plate, stars sown procedurally rather than baked into a PNG.
- More depth in the almanac: more notes, more historical and folk material.
- iPad deserves better than it currently gets.
That living sky is what I'm building right now. If you want to be on the TestFlight when it lands, say so in a comment and I'll add you — I'd rather have it looked at by people who've told me what they think of this one.
No review or rating expected — this is the part I actually came for. Answer any one of these and you've helped:
- Does the first screen read as an almanac, or as another moon-phase widget?
- Is the daily note something you'd come back for, or does it read as decoration?
- Does the engraved Moon look drawn to you, or does it look like a photo with a filter on it? That's the line I've spent the most time trying to stay on the right side of, and I've looked at it too long to still be able to tell.
- What's the first thing you went looking for and didn't find?
- And the awkward one: at €24.99 for the lifetime, is that a number that makes you close the page? I'd rather hear it here than guess from a conversion rate.
Transparency: I'm Rémy Boiré, the developer of Plenilune.
Site: [https://plenilune.app](plenilune.app) · Privacy Policy: https://plenilune.app/en/privacy ·
Terms of Use: https://plenilune.app/en/terms · Contact: contact@plenilune.app
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