Mosaica is a quiet workshop for laying tiles, one at a time.
You pick a grid, you pick a palette of stone, glass and ceramic pieces, and then you place tesserae. Fill a region, draw a line, lift a colour with the eyedropper, zoom in until a single tile fills the screen. Swap the whole palette and watch the same arrangement become a different object. Undo and redo go all the way back.
Finished pieces go to a personal gallery that keeps each mosaic together with its grid and its palette, so you can duplicate one into a new colourway without losing the original. Templates and ready-made palettes are there if a blank grid feels like too much to start with — a Roman floor, a stained glass panel, a pixel portrait.
The symmetry helper does not halve your work. On a big grid it cuts it to roughly an eighth.
A square grid has eight symmetries: the identity, three rotations, two mirrors through the edges, two mirrors through the diagonals. Mirror across one axis and you place half the tiles. Mirror across two and you place a quarter. Demand all eight and you only ever touch one wedge — and the wedge is smaller than an eighth of the grid, because the tiles sitting on the fold lines are shared. Pull the sliders.
On a 24 × 24 grid the eight-fold wedge is 78 tiles instead of 576 — 7.4× less placing. The catalogue of possible arrangements hardly notices: 1.51 × 10⁵²⁰ in all, 1.89 × 10⁵¹⁹ once twins are counted once. Collapsing all eight symmetries can never cost more than a factor of eight, and a factor of eight is nine tenths of one decimal digit.
Dark tiles are the wedge you actually place. Every pale tile is a reflection or rotation of one of them. The diagonal and the centre lines are shared, which is why the count lands a little above n²⁄8.
A plain eighth of 576 would be 72. The wedge is 78, because the tiles lying along the fold lines are carried onto themselves by some of the eight symmetries and have to be counted on their own. The surplus is always a quarter of the grid side: here, 6.
What is not on this page: the app's own tile textures, its templates, its palettes, its gallery and its brushes. The arithmetic above is a property of the square, not of Mosaica — anyone with graph paper can check it, and it tells you nothing about how the app feels to use.
What the release does and does not do.
Everything happens on the device. There is no server behind Mosaica, nothing syncs, and the app works in flight mode exactly as it does at home.
No sign-up, no email, no profile. The gallery lives in the app's own storage on your phone or tablet.
The current build carries no ad network and no analytics SDK. If that ever changes, the privacy policy changes first.
They are yours. We never see them, because they never leave the device unless you export or share a file yourself.
Who is behind it
LO PTY LTD
Director: Liam Anderson
U 401/19 Felix St, Lutwyche 4030, Queensland, Australia
Developer mail: tessera@loptyapps.rest
Privacy policy for Mosaica →