Imagery disappears when zooming out on mobile devices

CesiumJS
1

Hi all!

It looks like imagery tiles stop from being rendered when zooming out too much on mobile devices. The globe becomes all black. The bug is reproductible on the basic sandcastle example (https://sandcastle.cesium.com). Some things I’ve noted:

  • This happens with all imagery providers (tried with various ion resources like sentinel 2, bing aerial…, but also OSM, and some other external WMTS or XYZ servers)
  • This doesn’t happen with 3D tiles (the Google Maps Photorealistic 3d Tiles load just fine at every zoom level)
  • I can’t reproduce on a laptop (even when changing the screen size to get a phone’s screen ratio)
  • The globe becomes black even if the base color is set to something else
  • I’m running Chrome 140 on Android 14 (One Plus 9)
  • I attached a screenshot of what it looks like

Has anyone seen this before? Thanks in advance for your help!

Screenshot_2025-09-29-13-28-11-23_40deb401b9ffe8e1df2f1cc5ba480b12
Screenshot_2025-09-29-13-28-11-23_40deb401b9ffe8e1df2f1cc5ba480b121080×2412 124 KB

2

And here’s approximately the zoom level from which tiles start to render again

Screenshot_2025-09-29-13-29-22-38_40deb401b9ffe8e1df2f1cc5ba480b12
Screenshot_2025-09-29-13-29-22-38_40deb401b9ffe8e1df2f1cc5ba480b121080×2412 143 KB

3

Hi @lancelotimb,

Thanks for your post. I went ahead and filed a bug report in the Cesium repo Imagery disappears when zooming out on mobile devices - Chrome on Android · Issue #12936 · CesiumGS/cesium · GitHub

It looks like Chrome 140 on Android was recently released, so I believe this is the first we are hearing of this issue. We have not found any other mobile browsers & devices yet with the same problem.

If others encounter this issue, please comment on the issue with your device and mobile browser specs.

Thanks,
Luke