Slow iPhone 3G after iOS 4

How to disable Spotlight Search

Settings > General > Home Button > Spotlight Search

Uncheck all that you want to ... I disabled all of the items and noticed a speed difference.

iOS 4.1 will improve your speed a lot and if you restored the phone with a backup from 3.1.3 you have to go into the Settings>General>Reset>Reset All Settings so it goes to iOS 4 defaults. That should get rid of phone jankyness.

When going from 3 to 4 is like going from OSX Tiger to Leopard, computer needs to reset certain settings, you just have to do it manually on the iPhone, or just work fresh like reformatting your computer. The former is a much better solution.

I also experienced a substantial speed bump by disabling Spotlight. Before disabling it, I would get crashes while launching apps, slow load times and occasional freezes. I noticed that it was not necessarily in low memory situations, so I think Spotlight might be the heart of the problem here.

After disabling Spotlight I tried some of the apps, that are usually problematic and launched a lot of apps. I noticed that Safari likes to stay running in the background (probably frozen using the new iOS 4 technique), so be mindful of that in terms of performance vs free memory.

But so far disabling Spotlight has given me approximately iOS 3.1.3 performance again.

My 3G is dire since the upgrade. A colleague has the same issue with their 3GS. I'm glad I hadn't got around to upgrading my partners 3GS or I would have been well and truly in it.

Couldn't get the previous link to work regarding downgrading 😟

Such a shame, I'm really disappointed and need to revert.

Al

Sorry, doing a FULL RESTORE on my iPhone 3G did not help. I did the full restore because after upgrading to 4.0.1, my phone would no longer connect to my secure wireless network (others are having this problem too). Did the full restore out of desperation, and now the wifi issue is fixed, but my phone is still laggy, still slow, still crashes (requiring a full reboot) when I try to use some apps. And with 4.0.1., I now have the pleasure of seeing only a portion of the photos in my camera roll - I can still scroll down the screen, but the screen is black. Bah!

*Solution for slow iPhone 3G with iOS 4*

The performance of the 3G can be extremly improved by disabling most Spotlight-searches / indexing. To deactivate specific Spotlight indexing:

1. Settings -> General -> Home-Button -> Spotlight Search
2. deactivate almost all Spotlight searches (except e.g. Contacts)

Works perfect for me and my 3G is running as fast as before with iOS 3.x.

Enjoy

I have had it with Apple...

I have 2 x 2G iPhones, 1 x 3G, 1 X 3GS and I did order a 4 (but I did cancel that after all this...)
Just to say that I was your typically good customer.... but no more...

Really they have the capacity to let the 3G work normal, at his old speeds, but they just don't want to fix this, because they are trying to force us in buying new phones.... Apple sells hardware not so much software... so they want a quick turnover from us... like every year at least one new iPhone...

No communication from them, nothing never... Fixing this is not even on their list...

Thanks Apple... great job!!!

Make sure you tell them: http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

Apple is aware of the matter. I was contacted by Apple Care a few days ago regarding the slowness of iOS 4 on my iPhone 3G (they wanted my crash logs etc.) and that their engineers are actively looking into the problem. Hopefully this points to some kind of fix heading our way.

I was contacted as well, so I provided my abundant crash logs. That said, I'm not holding my breath.

Neither am I, but it would be good if they actually did come out with a fix (or even less likely, a public confirmation of the issue).

Downloaded iOS 4 for my 3G.......Lost Bluetooth, apps ran slow, camera took an age to open as well as other things.........eventually contacted Apple after many Restores............Apple were great, went to nearest Apple store afte booking an appointment and they replaced phone......im now back on iOS 3.1.3 and will not be updating til I see good reviews on here

To answer your last question, yes it is time for an iPhone 4!!! 🙂

The thing that works best is if you restore is as a new iPhone and then sync everything back over manually. The reason this works is because mainly when you get a new operating system, you should use the back up of it, it makes it slower. Start it as new and sync everything and it'll work.

Just finished downgrading via the Lifehacker article. Worked like a charm.

http://lifehacker.com/5572003/how-to-downgrade-your-iphone-3g[s]-from-ios-4-to-ios-313

I did have to download the old OS through their link, and it restored to an old backup from November. But it's completely worth it. It's back running the way it used to prior to the "upgrade" to 4.0

Getting really sick of Apple. I've had two high end desktops and one laptop die on me over the last couple years, and now this. Allowing 3G users to install 4.0 was irresponsible, bordering on something worse.

Good luck all.