Very slow and buggy tables in Notes for iOS 12
The simplicity of creating tables in the Notes App is very nice, but there are some serious performance and usability issues. The use case is common; a table can still be relatively small when the issues become apparent. Here is a list describing just some of the symptoms:
- Lag when scrolling (dragging) in any direction
- Creating a new row takes several seconds
- Selecting a cell causes Notes to become unresponsive for a few seconds
- Entering characters into a cell is laggy
- Row contents overlap row borders (vertical offset)
- Row contents completely overlap other rows
- Selecting desired cell is impossible when overlapping occurs (a neighboring cell is selected instead)
- While entering text into a cell the focus randomly changes to another cell
- Notes becomes completely unresponsive and crashes
How to reproduce
- Create a new note (either locally on your device or a folder synced to iCloud)
- Add a title for good measure
- Create 1 table
- Have at least 5 columns
- Add more than 50 rows
- Cells contain between 0 and 40 alphanumeric characters
- Continue adding rows and content and the problems will begin
- The longer the device is in active use, the worse the issues get
- Try split screen mode and the symptoms become extreme
In my case I am creating each note/table from scratch, not copying data from any other source.
See screenshots for examples.
Workaround
None. To correct visual rendering, open any another Note and return to the problematic Note. The table will appear normally again, but only for a while. However, the performance issues are constant.
Devices
I have experienced this on the latest devices:
iPad Pro (11-inch)
iPad (6th Gen)
These devices are new, use the most recent version of iOS 12, and have no other issues.
iPad Pro 11-inch Wi-Fi, Cellular