Notes App lagging after iOS 18 Update

Re-opening and closing the app (at least 20 times) didn’t work for me. It kept freezing whenever I tried to open any Note. I eventually figured out that the problem was caused by my having one particularly large Note (over 35MB including embedded photos). I finally got that Note to open in the Cloud by waiting several minutes. I then spent several more minutes trimming it down. Then Notes started working okay.

Frustrating that I lost the vast majority of that Note (I couldn’t Share it anywhere; Notes would just freeze). But at least I can now use Notes again.

Apple clearly did not user-test iOS 18 with a large Note!!! 😡

iOS version 18.0.1 .

I tried a few things, and none of them worked. I tried background app refresh, and leaving notes open for 30 min to help with indexing. Notes was still broken. I was forced to delete and reinstall -- but that left me feeling really insecure.

The delete-and-reinstall fix did work, though it was unsettling. Here are helpful tips.

(1) first sync notes to your mac or ipad and make sure they are there.

(2) make sure "Iphone Folder" is turned off in Notes settings. If it's on, move those into your icloud folder

(3) Two folders are virtual , "All Icloud" and "notes". These just list all notes and all unsorted notes respectively. They will sync from iCloud when you reinstall.

I had a good experience, and didn't notice any of my 5000+ notes missing. Images seemed to sync. My notes DB on iphone reduced in size after the reinstall.

Recommendation: Backup to another machine and then do uninstall-then-reinstall to restore the notes.

Deleting/redownloading and opening/closing app didn’t work. However cutting an entire decently large note and then pasting it back did work. I would imagine the issue may have something to do with mismatches in encoding of old/new notes or something like that. My suggestion would be copy pasting problematic notes into a new note.

Just realised that it’s related to bullet points within a heading for me. If I take the bullet points out it seems to not lag.

Also if I open all the sections and scroll to the bullet points it starts to lag over them, then when they are scrolled out of the view it stops lagging again.

Update on my part (1/20/25): The new formatting options that came with iOS 18 seem to be the cause. After a few posts here, I have now made the effort to change all the very long notes I know, which are nevertheless the ones with the new formatting, especially the ‘collapsibility’ of headings and subheadings. 

The app seems to work quite well again. Certainly not as fast as it should be (if, for example, the notes app on an old iPhone 8 with 16 iOS is even faster), but it significantly improves the really very limited usability. 

Perhaps this can help some of you until Apple has the courtesy to fix the issue.

I seem to have found a solution.

I set my notes view to View as List instead of View as Gallery and the lag resolved. I can live without gallery mode.

(Seemed like the lag improved a bit with the update to 18.2 in Gallery, but not much.)

This is the only way it fixed it for me! Deleted app and then reinstalled and added back all notes from the cloud. works really well now .... as before !! Thank you for the advice.

tried the restart app 5 times which worked on iphone 14. Same trick, then re-installing notes on ipad pro fixed issue there. Also back to normal on Macbook. I was sceptical this would work, but it has for me. Still, I suspect Apple knew and decided to let users figure it out rather than invest in more development to avoid issue altogether.

Had same issue (it was maddening) Just saw a fix in another post: Close/open the notes app 5-6 times…and tried it. FIXED! Thank goodness, use the notes feature a LOT. Many thanks to op Pomumm!

Notes App lagging after iOS 18 Update: FIXED IT

The old “turn it off and turn it on” way

Settings - Accounts - icloud - notes - sync this iphone - turn it off

Turn off iphone

Turn on iphone

Settings - Accounts - icloud - notes - sync this iphone - turn it on

Turn off iphone

Turn on iphone

Go to notes - watch it load the icloud note numbers

When done, THEN open notes

My notes began to lag horribly and I’ve finally realised it could not handle the “*” asterisk I had started using for bulletpoints… I think it was trying to read every single one in some way to understand them as unformatted bullets with the potential to be made into bullets.

(if I put a space next to them they would become a genuine bullet)

I quickly did a find/replace in indesign to turn every bullet/asterisk (about 500) into a less troublesome symbol (e.g “>”) and my notes are now as quick to use as they always used to be. I hope this helps someone as it was driving me crazy!

I had the same problem, not only on iPhone, but also on iPad. I read somewhere that the solution is to close the app several times. I tried it, and after closing, opening, closing, etc. 5-6 times, the app works fine on both devices.

So I’m having the same problem, after closing and opening several times it worked, but. There’s something else, it only works if you view the notes as a list, if I turn it back into “view as gallery” the note app slows down again and it’s hard opening and creating new notes, so basically nothing was solved, it’s only a temporary solution.

I have some long notes, but they have nothing to do with handwriting. The problem has only existed since iOS 18.0, so it will have to do with some of the new features added with it. I also suspect the possible new formatting options. However, the problem is gone as long as you are not connected to the Internet (Cloud). It therefore seems to be mainly to do with the synchronisation.