Catenda Site is the Catenda mobile app for phones and tablets.
How much you can show in its 3D viewer depends on the device, and this article describes what to look for.
Â
The recommendations for Catenda Hub in a browser, including on a tablet, are described in Hardware recommendation.
Â
The following topics are described in this article:
Â
Â
1. Operating systems
Catenda Site is available for iPhone, Android phones and tablets, iPad, iPod touch and Apple Vision.
A recent phone or tablet on the latest version of its operating system is recommended.
Keep both the operating system and Catenda Site up to date, because updates often improve how the device handles 3D graphics.
Â
The following topics are described in this section:
Â
Â
1.1 iOS: iPhone and iPod touch
On an iPhone or iPod touch, Catenda Site is installed from the App Store.
Catenda Site requires iOS 13.4 or later.
The iPadOS 16 and 17 issue with the 3D viewer on iPad described below does not affect iPhone.
Â
1.2 Android: phones and tablets
On an Android phone or tablet, Catenda Site is installed from Google Play.
Catenda Site requires Android 7.0 or later.
If Google Play reports that Catenda Site is not available for your device, this is not a limit of the device.
How to install the app in that case is described in Catenda Site - Troubleshooting.
Â
1.3 iPadOS: iPad
On an iPad, Catenda Site is installed from the App Store.
Catenda Site requires iPadOS 13.4 or later.
The 3D viewer works on iPadOS 15 and earlier, and on iPadOS 18 and later.
On iPadOS 16 and 17, a fault in iPadOS prevents the app from showing 3D models, so update an iPad on one of these versions to iPadOS 18 if an update is available.
The following iPads cannot be updated past iPadOS 16 or 17, so the 3D viewer in Catenda Site does not work on them once they run one of these versions:
iPad (5th and 6th generation)
iPad Pro 9.7-inch
iPad Pro 10.5-inch
iPad Pro 12.9-inch (1st and 2nd generation)
Â
On these iPads, models can still be viewed in Catenda Hub in Safari.
To find out which model an iPad is, see Identify your iPad model on the Apple website.
Â
1.4 visionOS: Apple Vision
On Apple Vision, Catenda Site is installed from the App Store.
Catenda Site requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
Â
Â
2. Getting the most out of the 3D viewer
On a phone or tablet it helps to show only what you need for the task at hand:
Enable only the models you need in the model selector, rather than every model in the project.
Choose speed over quality in the viewer performance setting.
Close other apps that use a lot of memory before opening large models.
Â
More tips for working with large models are described in 3D Viewer optimization.
Â
Â
3. 3D models on a mobile device
Â
3.1 Graphics memory, not storage
Models shown in the 3D viewer are held in the memory of the graphics processor.
On phones and tablets the graphics processor shares its memory with the rest of the device, and there is less of it than on a computer with a dedicated graphics card.
How much geometry a device can show at the same time therefore depends on its chip and its memory, not on its storage space.
A device with more storage does not load more models.
Â
3.2 Recommended devices
For dense geometry projects (LOD 400 and above), or when many models have to be shown together, a tablet with a high-end chip is recommended, such as an iPad Pro or an iPad Air with an M-series chip.