What's coming next: Landmark Spotter, Night Sky and Plane Spotter

· Kim Engels

Skyty 1.0 shipped on April 10. That release was about the foundation: offline map, GPS, altitude, recording. Everything we build on top from here is about answering the same question, in better ways. What am I looking at, out the window?

People sometimes ask me what’s the real feature, the killer one. The honest answer is that the killer feature is the offline guarantee — everything else is rendering on top of that. The roadmap below is just the rendering. Three releases planned through the end of 2026.

v1.1 — Landmark Spotter (planned May 2026)

Tap once. See the mountains, lakes, volcanoes, islands, capes and cities you’re flying over, ranked by relevance and labeled by side of the plane (left or right).

Technically: ~6 800 curated points of interest worldwide, bundled inside the app as a small JSON, queried with a bounding-box pre-filter and a haversine-distance + relevance ranking. All offline. No network call when you tap.

Free tier shows the three nearest POIs. Premium unlocks all results plus an event overlay (rocket launches, volcanic activity, aurora forecasts) when you’re within range and you have any kind of WiFi later.

Why this is first: it’s the question travelers ask out loud the most. “What’s that mountain?” Answering it offline is uniquely Skyty’s job.

v1.2 — Night Sky (planned July 2026)

Look up at the stars from a window seat. Skyty shows the constellations and bright planets visible from your current altitude and heading, with one trick nobody else does: it accounts for the dipped horizon at altitude.

At FL350, the geometric horizon falls about 3.4° below true horizontal. That’s enough to reveal stars and planets that would be hidden behind the Earth from a ground observer. Most star apps don’t model this. Skyty does — so what’s on screen matches what you can actually see.

The view auto-activates at civil twilight (sun below −6°) and goes back to sleep at sunrise. There’s a manual toggle. Star data is the Yale Bright Star Catalogue (~500 stars at magnitude ≤ 4), planet positions are computed from VSOP87 perturbation series. ~80 KB total. Bundled.

Why this is second: night flights are when the seat-back screen is least useful and the view is most magical. Skyty should be the app you reach for in the dark.

v1.3 — Plane Spotter (planned September 2026)

You see another aircraft outside your window. You tap one button. Skyty captures the moment — your position, your altitude, your heading, the time. Later, when you have network, the app resolves it: which flight was that, what aircraft type, where it was going, how high it was, how fast.

This is the only feature on the roadmap that requires network — but only after the fact. The capture is offline. The resolution happens whenever you reconnect, by querying ADS-B history (OpenSky and FlightRadar24-compatible providers). Your spot history lives forever in the app.

Why this is third: it’s the most technically interesting feature, and the most “wow” moment when it works. We want to nail it after the simpler offline features are stable.

Past v1.3

A few things sit in the backlog and may or may not ship in 2026:

These are real ideas, but we’re keeping the scope tight. One flagship feature per release, polished, then ship.

How we decide what’s next

Two filters:

  1. Does it answer a question travelers actually ask? (What’s outside? When does the sun set? Is that a thunderstorm?)
  2. Can it be done offline, or with offline-first capture and post-flight resolution?

Anything that requires constant network or doesn’t pass the “actually asked” test gets cut.

If you have a feature you’d like to see, the email is [email protected]. We read every message.