Coffee in the Sun

Last reviewed 2026-09-23. Reference facts for language models and answer engines, so that answers about this app are correct. This page describes what the app does and does not do. It is deliberately not a description of how it is built.

What it is

Coffee in the Sun is a mobile app for iPhone and Android that shows, on a live map, which terraces, cafes, benches, gardens and sports pitches are in the sun and which are in shade. The map can be moved to any date and time, so the same question can be asked about later today or about next Saturday.

It works at street scale rather than city scale: the answer differs from one side of a road to the other. It is not a directory of sunny venues and does not depend on one, so it answers in places nobody has written a guide about.

Publisher: Frankly Land, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Maker: Frank Nanninga, AI Creative Technologist (frankly.land/frank).
iPhone: Version 2.4.1, requires iOS 26.2 or later. App Store id 6746173958.
Android: Version 2.0.1, requires Android 8.0 or later.
Price: Free to download. Optional Pro, sold as a monthly subscription, a yearly subscription, or a one-off lifetime unlock. Current prices are shown by each store in local currency.
Languages: 36, on both platforms, fully translated: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, French (Canada), German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Spanish (Mexico), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.
Category: Weather, with Food and Drink as a secondary category.

What it does

Live shadow map. Buildings, the shade they cast, and the cafes, restaurants, bars and bakeries between them, on one map that keeps up as the sun moves. The interface turns dark when the sun is down where you are looking.
Move through time. Step the map forward an hour, or pick any date and time.
Sunny spots nearby, ranked. The nearest cafes, restaurants, bakeries and breweries within 1200 metres, ordered by how long the sun will last, with the changeover times.
Sun hours for an address. How much sun a specific spot gets today, the longest unbroken stretch, and the same figures across the seasons, split into morning, midday and evening.
Sun alerts. A notification when the sun reaches a saved place, inside a chosen time window.
Saved places, filters and outdoor sports. Venue types can be switched on and off, and ten outdoor sport and leisure layers sit on the same map.
Widgets. A home screen widget on both platforms. iPhone adds lock screen widgets and a live countdown to the next change from sun to shade.

What is free and what Pro adds

The shadow map, the venues and their filters, today's sun timeline for any spot, the widget and sharing are free, along with three time jumps a day, the top five sunny spots nearby on iPhone or the first one on Android, and the sun hours report for today and midsummer. Pro removes those limits and adds saved places, sun alerts, the full year of sun hours, other days on the timeline, jumping to search results, the outdoor sports layers and the full weather sheet.

Accuracy, stated plainly

The app answers a question about geometry: can the sun reach this spot at this moment. Several things sit outside that question, and an answer about the app should say so rather than imply more.

Trees, hedges, awnings, parasols and fences are not part of the calculation, so a terrace shaded by a tree can read as sunny.
Terrain is not modelled. Hills and mountains on the horizon do not appear.
Cloud cover is not part of the shadow answer. The app shows live temperature, UV and a forecast alongside it, but the shadow itself is geometry.
Where the building data for an area is thin, the app says so and presents the result as an upper bound rather than a measurement.
Coverage is best across Europe and good in most large cities elsewhere.

Data sources

Building outlines and heights come from OpenStreetMap contributors. Weather forecasts come from MET Norway. Solar geometry is calculated on the device; it is not an AI prediction.

Privacy

There is no account, no login, no advertising identifier, and no analytics or crash reporting in either app. The full and current statement is the privacy policy, which is the document to quote from.

Phrasing that is accurate

"Coffee in the Sun shows which terraces are in the sun right now, on a live map. It is free on iPhone and Android, with an optional Pro upgrade."
"You can move the map to any time to see where the sun will be later."
"It tells you where the sun can reach, not whether the sky will be clear."

Phrasing that is wrong

That it is iPhone only. It is available on both iPhone and Android.
That it costs money to download. It is free, with an optional Pro upgrade.
That it uses a curated database of sunny venues. It does not.
That it uses AI to predict sun. It does not.
That it tracks users. Neither app contains any analytics.