IFO

Support

IFO is made by one person, and email reaches them directly — not a queue. Most questions are one of the five below, so start here.

The sky looks empty. Is it broken?

Usually not. Aircraft positions come from adsb.lol, a volunteer network of ground receivers. Coverage is excellent near cities and along major routes, and can be genuinely thin in rural areas, over water, and in parts of the world with few volunteers.

IFO is built to tell you the difference. If the feed has been returning zero aircraft for several minutes, the status line changes to say there is no receiver coverage here rather than implying the sky is quiet. A blank sky with no such message means the feed is answering and there really is nothing in range.

Satellites are different — they are computed on your device from orbit data, so they work anywhere on Earth, including indoors and offline. If you see satellites but no aircraft, everything is working correctly.

Things worth trying

• Increase the range on the RANGE arc down the left side of the radar disc — drag its knob along the arc, up to 40 nm (80 nm with Pro).
• Check that nothing is switched off: the aircraft/satellite/drone tally keys down the left of the sky view, and the AIR bank on the switch panel (the PNL key).
• Confirm IFO has location permission, and that you have a fix — the app says "Getting your location…" until it does.

The labels don't line up with what I can see

This is the compass, and it happens to every AR sky app. The magnetometer in a phone is easily pulled off by nearby metal, magnets in cases and stands, cars, and even reinforced concrete. Nothing in the app can detect this on its own: ARKit and the compass read the same sensor, so they agree just as readily when it is wrong.

The fix is to tell IFO what you can see:

• Drag the sky sideways until the labels sit on the objects. IFO remembers the correction and re-applies it next time.
• Line it up on something certain — the Moon, or a bright planet — rather than on an aircraft, which is moving.
• RE-CENTRE on the switch panel (the PNL key, SETUP bank) re-reads the compass from scratch.
• Move away from metal, take the phone out of a magnetic case or mount, and wave it in a figure-eight to let iOS recalibrate.
• TRIM RESET, beside it, starts over if a correction was saved somewhere it no longer applies.

What IFO can and cannot see

The app has an honest answer built in — Settings → About → "What IFO can and can't see". The short version:

• Aircraft must be broadcasting ADS-B and be heard by a nearby volunteer receiver. Most airliners are. Many small private aircraft, most gliders and balloons, and some military flights that deliberately mask themselves are not.
• Satellites come from the public catalogue. Classified objects are not in it. Satellites in Earth's shadow are invisible to your eye, and IFO hides them by default.
• Drones must be broadcasting Remote ID, and an iPhone can only receive the Bluetooth flavor of it. Many drones — including most DJI models, which broadcast over WiFi — will not appear at all. Range is typically a few hundred metres.
• Stars are drawn from a catalogue down to about magnitude 5.5 — roughly what a good pair of eyes sees from a dark site. The field fades out in daylight, which is correct rather than broken.

If IFO shows nothing where you can plainly see something, that is the interesting case and worth an email. It is also, quite deliberately, the whole point of the app.

Purchases, trials and refunds

• Restore a purchase — Settings → Unlock IFO Pro → Restore Purchases. This is the fix for a new phone or a reinstall. Use the same Apple Account you bought with.
• Cancel a subscription or end a trial — Settings → Manage Subscription, or the Subscriptions section of iOS Settings under your Apple Account. Cancel before the trial ends and you are not charged.
• Refunds are handled entirely by Apple, at reportaproblem.apple.com. IFO never sees your payment details and cannot issue a refund directly — but do email if something went wrong, because a purchase that did not work is a bug worth knowing about.
• Bought Pro but it still looks locked? Try Restore Purchases first. If that does not do it, email with your receipt and it will be sorted out.

Battery and data

The AR sky view runs the camera, the compass and the GPS at once, so it uses battery at roughly the rate a maps app in navigation mode does. Two things help: compass mode, which replaces the camera feed with a dark sky and cuts the largest cost, and a shorter aircraft range, which means less data to fetch and draw on each poll (only the far end of the Pro range polls less often too).

Data use is small — aircraft positions are a few kilobytes per poll. The one exception is switching on the Starlink constellation, which downloads a few megabytes of orbit data the first time.

Reporting something wrong

The most useful reports include: what you saw with your eyes, what IFO said (a screenshot or a shared sighting card is ideal), the time and rough location, and your IFO version. Sky bugs are hard to reproduce without those, and easy with them.