KaleidoTile vs Surface Explorer
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
KaleidoTile
Create dynamic, colorful art by exploring and morphing polyhedra and tilings. Decorate your creations with personal photos or camera images. Discover the relationships between different geometric shapes and their symmetries.
- Explore polyhedra and tilings
- Create kinematic art
- Decorate with personal photos
- Morph between shapes
- Guide to Tilings and Symmetry
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Explore polyhedra and tilings while creating colorful kinematic art. Polyhedron mode lets you create traditional polyhedra, while Tiling mode smooths your polyhedra into tilings of the sphere, Euclidean plane or hyperbolic plane. Decorate your work with images from your photo library, fresh images from the camera, or colors. Within each symmetry group, any polyhedron or tiling morphs to any other; for example, you may morph a dodecahedron to an icosahedron, confirming that they share the same symmetries. KaleidoTile comes with a guide to Tilings and Symmetry.
Surface Explorer
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Surface Explorer is a high-performance visualizer for intricate mathematical surfaces — 2D manifolds embedded in three- or four-dimensional space, and 3D slices of four-dimensional hypersurfaces — bringing abstract geometry to life with real-time GPU rendering. KEY FEATURES • Cross Section — slice four-dimensional hypersurfaces and watch their 3D sections change shape as you rotate them in 4D or slide the cutting plane along the fourth axis, even along a 4D camera path. • Ray Marching Engine — real-time rendering of implicit surfaces and signed-distance fields, with procedural displacement, transparency, adjustable shells, and a precise mode for high-degree equations. • Multi-Mesh Surfaces — build figures from several independent grids, each with its own color, transparency, texture and domain. • Geodesic Flow — explore intrinsic geometry on curved manifolds (S³, H²×R, SL(2,R) and more), integrating geodesics from initial conditions. • 4D Spatial Exploration — dedicated controls for hyperspatial rotation (Omega, Phi, Psi), projection, and 3D and 4D camera paths. • 4D Lighting Models — Directional, Observer, and Slice lighting designed for hyperspace. • Dynamic GLSL Scripting — write custom shaders for procedural textures and surface logic in the built-in editor. • Backgrounds — images and procedural effects, fixed on screen or wrapped around the scene as a sphere, cylinder or cube. • Audio-Visual Synthesis — synchronize geometric parameters with a mathematical sound synthesizer. • Video Recording — capture your explorations directly in the app and save them to your device. A library of ready-made presets ships with the app, from classic parametric surfaces to black-hole ergospheres, curved-space tori and slices of the 3-torus, together with a searchable built-in manual. Built with Qt and Metal for smooth, native performance on iPhone and iPad.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Surface Explorer at fortnightly against KaleidoTile's every 7 months. On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
KaleidoTile ships an update every 7 months, Surface Explorer fortnightly. The most recent releases landed on October 12, 2026 and October 4, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | KaleidoTile | Surface Explorer |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.1 (7 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 66.7% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 7 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 7 months | Fortnightly — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Mac | iPhone, iPad, Mac |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 3 MB | 62 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Jeff Weeks | GAETANO MOSCHETTI |
In-app purchases
KaleidoTile
No in-app purchases
Surface Explorer
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is KaleidoTile free?
Is Surface Explorer free?
Do KaleidoTile or Surface Explorer have ads?
Which is updated more often, KaleidoTile or Surface Explorer?
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