Update InVintory in the App Store, then fully close and reopen it. That is what our support team tries first, and it clears most of these — real fixes for stuck and frozen screens do ship, and the app never tells you when a new version is out.
⚠️ Moving dots do not mean the app is still working. The three gold dots are drawn outside the app, so they keep animating even after it has stopped responding altogether. Judge by the clock and by taps, not by the animation: requests give up after about a minute, so dots older than a minute or two are waiting for something that will never arrive.
Do this first — update, then reopen
Open the App Store, search for InVintory, and tap Update if that is what the button says.
Close it completely: swipe up from the bottom of the screen and hold, then flick the InVintory card away. Going back to the Home Screen is not the same thing.
Open it again and give it a few seconds.
App Store → InVintory → Update → close the app fully → reopen
Still responding, or frozen?
Tap something that should react — the back arrow, a tab, a different row. If anything responds, the app is fine and one part of it is waiting; if nothing does, it is frozen and force quitting is the only way out. The three gold dots on their own are a loading indicator, not an error.
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 |
Taking a look, above Checking to make sure we don’t already have this in our database, while submitting a new wine | This one can wait forever. Force quit, reopen, and check whether the wine went through before submitting it again |
Nothing at all responds, on any screen | Frozen. Force quit and reopen — see below |
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.
Frozen after adding bottles
If the app stops responding on the iPhone screen that confirms what you just added, force quit and reopen it. Your bottles were already saved before that screen appeared — the app asks our servers to add them and only builds the confirmation from what came back, so the add went through even though the screen never let you finish it. Open your collection and you will find them. Please do not add them again; duplicates are more work to undo than the freeze was.
If the app closes by itself instead of sitting there, reopen it — that is also how its crash report reaches us.
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. That screen is a connection failure, and it is a different problem from a stale or frozen app.
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 and the request simply waits. Turn Wi-Fi off, let it fall back to mobile data, and try again.
Android and the web app
Android shows the same three gold dots, and everything above applies except the 3D cellar and the add-bottles screen. 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 report a bug — name the screen it happens on, which is the most useful thing you can tell us
What to do if your collection looks empty — it loaded, but nothing is in it
How to fix login problems — if you land on the sign-in screen instead of your collection