Q: Iphone 3G slow after update to IOS4

Upgraded wife's 3g phone from 3.1.2 to 4.0.1. Phone ran slow. It ran like it was Vista on an old XP machine. My wife started to blame me for ruining her phone. I have now rolled it back to 3.1.3 thanks to the help of the jailbreak community. She likes her phone again, and told me not to "upgrade" it anymore....

Same performance problem. Worked OK on 3.X. Upgrading to iOS4 has KILLED performance. And no way to restore backwards--except jailbreak. Getting pretty tired of Apple's nazi-like attitude. Loved the iPhone before, but with the antenna and iOS4 situation, I probably will go with an android set when my contract expires in JAN.

I'm joining to log a complaint in hopes Apple addresses the problem. My 3G was fine before upgrading to iOS 4.0.1. It now takes forever to launch applications and settings screen. The keyboard it sluggish and the device is much harder to use.

Apple, please fix this.

Same problems here. Upgraded to OS4, My 3G is now less than half as fast. It went from acceptable to almost useless. Opening messages takes almost 10 seconds, many apps just crash after waiting 15-20 secs for launch. Hopefully Apple does something.

Wall Street Journal Apple Probes Complaints About iOS4 on iPhone 3G

*388 comments* so far!

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/28/apple-investigates-reports-of-problems-wi th-ios4-on-iphone-3g/tab/comments/#comment-151087

My 3G was only a little bit slower after the upgrade to begin with (figured it was just the breaks for having a 2 year old device with a new OS), but hard booting it (pushing the sleep wake and home until the phone shuts off and reboots) has sped mine up a bit. A few apps still take an extra second or two to open, but the phone works great otherwise. Non-issue for me.

To add yet another voice to the chorus...

I will admit to using a "Jailbreak" tool to enable background tasks and wallpaper when I first installed iOS 4 on my 3G. I did NOT install the third-party app store "Cydia", I only enabled the not-officially-allowed-on-3G built-in iOS 4 features. I found it slow, unresponsive, and app-crash prone.

So, I figured Apple had disabled those features for a reason, and a few days later did a complete restore to "stock" iOS 4. Losing wallpaper wasn't a big deal, losing background tasks (notably Pandora) was annoying. But hey, I'd get responsiveness back and less crashing, right?


And discovered it was just as slow... Just as unresponsive... Just as app-crash prone...

The YouTube "iOS 4 on iPhone 3G (Parody)" video sums it up perfectly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdk2cJpSXLg even down to the massive delay answering a call.

If you're going to disable features for the sake of "performance and stability", then the system should have acceptable performance and stability with them OFF, at least.

I haven't gotten around to re-jailbreaking to re-enable background tasks and wallpaper, but I might as well, I don't see any speed improvement leaving them off. (When I had them on, I could stream Pandora while playing X-Plane just fine.)

My iphone, which i used to love, can be described with just one word since the upgrade: UNUSABLE.
Apple has lost a fan and customer with this upgrade.

I have the iPhone 3G with iOS4 installed, and have come across two "tricks" to make the phone perform satisfactorily:

1. Do the hard reset (sleep/wake button + home button until the phone restarts).
2. Make the following changes in your preferences:

Settings > General > Home Button > Spotlight Search ... then uncheck the search services, except for contacts, music, mail... the stuff you really want to be able to search.

Those two steps have made running iOS4 on the 3G O.K.

I agree with your workaround.


I had considerable performance issues with multiple phones. I applied the changes and performed a reset afterwards. No real issues . I asked users to post success / failure rates but I've only seen one or two so far.

After the iOS4 update all of your Spotlight Search options may have been selected.

On the 3G iPhone Go to SETTINGS> GENERAL> HOME BUTTON> SPOTLIGHT SEARCH

On the 3GS Go to SETTINGS> GENERAL> SPOTLIGHT SEARCH

De-select the search options you don't want (I just use messages notes). The more options selected the more processing / memory is used by your phone.

Reset Phone -

Group, Please let the forum know if this worked. It takes about a minute or so to do.

Message was edited by: Kasaar

Me too. I also. Stupid thing keeps locking up like an old verzion of Windows.

C'mon Apple - get it fixed already.

It helped.

I'm experiencing the same issues. After IOS4, the phone is almost unusable as a phone, much less gaming, taking pictures, browsing the web...

I initially had all searching disabled, and have recently enabled it for contacts and music and haven't notice any change, still the same level of slow.

The Youtube video (not posting link because I don't want to get banned) accurately portrays what I'm experiencing with my 3G now that I've upgraded to IOS4.

Mine is almost useless. When I go to answer an incoming call, I'll have to swipe the slider about 5 or 6 times.. The slider isn't recognizing my touch and doesn't respond. sometimes it will actually recognize and answer the call, but the slider on screen doesn't move.

Opening almost any program takes forever. Especially safari, google maps, and camera. Safari will ALWAYS try to load the last webpage and will take about 30-60 seconds before it will respond to me touching the X to stop. I can't do any kind of search without stopping it from loading the page first.

Other than the combined inbox, I don't see ANYthing that helps me with iOS 4. The folders is nice, but they're actually too hard to see the icons, so makes it almost as hard as multiple pages of apps.

Animations usually don't happen. When they do, they're jumpy, but usually whatever function is animated will just appear. When I use the slider, it will usually not move, or it will move about half way and then get stuck in the middle. The phone still unlocks, but the slider is stuck in the middle until the screen goes away. When I input my password, it usually doesn't recognize the first number typed, so the second number goes into the first position.. WRONG PASSCODE.. I almost always have to enter it twice.

I have LOVED my iPhone until now, and I've been a mac user for almost 20 years.. Now I just can't wait to get something else.

I restored it and set it up as a new phone and still no improvement.

When the battery is dead, you just lose the call when your phone shuts down.. No notice at all. This isn't new though.

Same here. Right now it was soooo slow I couldn't even unlock it to take a call. Took about 30 seconds for each action. I plugged it into iTunes and it seems stable now. Weird.

In general the performance has been a bit slower, but I kinda expected some performance loss but not a complete lock up or waiting 30+ seconds for each action.