Cupsmate

CupsMate is an astrology app that does the arithmetic properly and tells you when it can't.

Most astrology apps guess. They assume noon when you don't know your birth time, round your birth place to the nearest big city, and print a percentage for the moon that nobody computed. CupsMate doesn't. Your chart is calculated from your actual birth date, time and place, resolved through the time zone your clocks were really on — a 1994 Lisbon birth goes through CET, not today's WET. And where something genuinely can't be known, the app says so instead of filling the gap with a plausible number.

YOUR CHART
Sun, moon, rising and the planets, drawn on a wheel you can read. The birth-place search covers every town above five thousand people, because three hundred kilometres is the difference between one rising sign and another. No birth time? Then no ascendant and no houses — named on screen, not invented.

A READING EACH MORNING
One reading a day, at eight in your own time zone. The heading above it is checkable — the moon's sign, which of your houses it's crossing, whether Mercury is retrograde — and the words underneath are written by people, not generated. Yesterday stays for a day so you can see whether it landed. There is no tomorrow, at any setting.

TAROT
A full 78-card deck, shuffled and cut in a room you can sit in. Draw when you want to; seal a reading into your notebook when it's worth keeping.

FRIENDS AND COMPATIBILITY
Add the people in your life, keep private notes on them, and read the synastry between your charts. Find friends already here without handing over your address book: contacts are turned into fingerprints on your phone before anything is sent, and anyone who isn't on CupsMate is forgotten as the answer arrives. Finding someone only lets you ask — nothing of either person reaches the other until they say yes.

TONIGHT'S SKY
Hold your phone up and see what's actually above you: planets, the moon, the bright stars, the Milky Way, drawn from real ephemerides for your location and the minute you're standing in. Ingresses, retrograde stations and moon phases, with the times they happen.

A NOTEBOOK
Notes, kept lines and sealed readings, written instantly whether or not you have signal, and synced to your account rather than to a phone.

A WIKI
Every card, every sign, every planet, the crystals and the astronomy behind all of it — in plain language, without the hedging.

PRIVACY
Location is asked for once, on the screens that are wrong without it, and never to print a nicety. The weather clause in your reading is off until you turn it on, and your position is rounded to about eleven kilometres before it leaves the phone. Your birth data is yours: a friend sees your placements, never your date, time or place. Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with advertisers.

Available in English and Romanian.

CupsMate is offered for reflection and entertainment. Some depth — full synastry reports and the longer readings — requires a subscription; the rest of the app, including your chart, your daily reading, tarot and the sky view, does not.