The three gold dots are InVintory's loading indicator, not an error. They mean the app is waiting for an answer — from our servers, or from the 3D engine. Where the dots are sitting tells you which, and that decides what to do.
⚠️ The dots keep moving even when the app has stopped responding. That animation is drawn outside the app so it never stutters, which means motion is not evidence anything is still happening. Judge by the clock: requests give up after about a minute, so dots older than a minute or two are waiting for something that will never arrive.
Find your case
What you are looking at | What to do |
Dots on a dark screen with your storage's name and a back arrow or ✕ at the top, after opening a cellar in 3D | Tap back or ✕, then open the cellar again. No need to quit |
Dots in a small rounded box, dimming the screen behind them | Blocks taps, has no cancel. Give it a minute, then force quit |
Dots inside one list or card, rest of the screen still usable | Only that section is loading. Leave the screen and come back |
The InVintory wordmark on a plain background, no dots | The opening screen, while we work out who you are signed in as |
A 3D cellar that never finishes
The most common case. The 3D view waits for the engine to report that your shelves have finished drawing, and sets no time limit of its own — so if that report never comes, the dots stay indefinitely rather than erroring. Backing out and reopening the cellar reloads the engine from scratch and almost always clears it. The screen keeps its back arrow or ✕ throughout, so you are never trapped there.
Home → Cellars & fridges → your storage → 3D view
A blocking loader that will not clear
Saving bottles, switching collection, opening a bottle from a widget or a notification — these put the dots in a box over a dimmed screen, and that overlay swallows taps deliberately, so you cannot start the same thing twice. There is no cancel, so force quitting genuinely is the way out: swipe up from the bottom of the screen and hold, flick the InVintory card away, and open it again. Then check whether what you were doing took effect before you repeat it.
Your connection — the misunderstood part
Having no internet does not produce endless dots. The app notices at once and shows We're having trouble connecting to our servers, with a Retry button and a Logout and log back in link.
What does cause a hang is a connection that looks fine but carries nothing — hotel or airport Wi-Fi with a sign-in page you never completed, a captive portal, a dropped VPN. Your device reports Wi-Fi, so nothing errors; the request simply waits. Turn Wi-Fi off, let it fall back to mobile data, and try again.
If the same screen does it every time
Update first — check the App Store for Update rather than Open, since real fixes for stuck screens do ship. If it survives that, tell us, and name the screen: it is the most useful thing you can say.
Android and the web app
Android shows the same three gold dots, and everything above applies except the 3D cellar. The web app uses a spinning circle instead; when a page there breaks properly you get an error screen carrying an Error ID, which is worth quoting to us.
Next steps
How to fix login problems — if you land on the sign-in screen instead of your collection
What to do if your collection looks empty — it loaded, but nothing is in it
How to report a bug — what to send so we can find it in our logs