Notes App lagging after iOS 18 Update

Having the same issue and it's frustrating. I am relying on Apple Notes for work and personal use cases, and ever since Apple Intelligence's latest update it has lagged a lot especially when using collapsable sections. It is ruining the experience for me. It feels like a tiny hammer that is very heavy to lift and use. Apple, please fix this!

This bug is not new. Notes stutters when Typing longer notes since years. But since the last update Typing is near impossible. I don’t know why Apple needs ages to resolve this bug. Special not, because I do send them my user data information…..

I didn't have any problems before iOS 18 (with thousands of notes) Something went wrong with iOS 18. While I initially suspected faulty iCloud sync, it really seems to ‘only’ affect the app itself (as the app behaves just as ‘laggy’ in flight mode).

I am desperate enough to find all the formatted notes to treat them according to the exclusion principle. But there is no search for e.g. notes with the heading levels. Or for notes that contain an enumeration. So if you have thousands of notes, you can do virtually nothing. 

I recently started using Notes to help organise my life. I love the collapse feature but the lag is unbearable. Even on an IPhone 15 pro. In honesty to pay that much for a device and have software problems on that scale is embarrassing. Apple Please fix this!

When I went into accounts then iCloud then notes and turned off the sync a pop-up window came up to confirm “delete from my iPhone“. So this was not a solution in my book. I can’t afford deleting them from my iPhone and taking any chance I might not get them back. If I remove the app from my iPhone I’m afraid the same thing will happen. Why can’t they just fix the software?

I really appreciate what I read, it just didn't work for me. Why would it? In fact this has the incredible disadvantage when there are thousands and thousands of notes with several GB and you are mainly equipped with only mobile data plan.

For this exact moment, your success could also ‘simply’ be due to the new iOS version 18.3.

For the reasons I mentioned below, that's not an option for me either. Deleting only affects the notes stored locally on the iPhone, which remain in the iCloud. The least you have to worry about after reactivating the iCloud sync is ‘hours’ of traffic until all notes are back on the iPhone again.

Still the same on OS 15.3 etc.

It's definitely related to bullet points / highlights within a sub heading for me. Only on large notes. When all headings are expanded, it scrolls fine until it hits a section with either bullet points or highlights in it.

But it completely grinds to a halt when everything in the note is collapsed now. Barely scrolls at all.

Strange that Apple isn't fixing this.

Me as well. After 18.3 update sometimes it just deletes something I just wrote, and when I try to transfer to pdf it just completely leaves out sections of my notes. Not happy with this one Apple. Please fix this. I rely heavily on the notes app.

Since apple has been ‘playing dead man’ on the subject for months, I would rather not hope at the moment. I assume that it simply affects too few users in Apple's eyes. Which of course doesn't help those of us who rely so heavily on Notes.

Same with me, I use notepad every day for years and I have a feeling that they are tracking us and recording what we typed that’s why it lags

they needs to fix this, cuz the lag is getting worse, it idle for like 5 sec and it’s doing it own things and back to normal, quite annoying

i am having similar problems. . . i thought it was only on my phone, but it happened on my computer today as well. the app is strangely glitchy. it obviously works fine sometimes. but i've had moments where i am typing in a note with a lot of text. . . and it crashes and the recent stuff i wrote is gone. i've had moments where i am typing, try to move the cursor to edit something and it jumps to the middle of the note. (those were on the phone, 16 pro max) but on my M1 MacBook Air i just copied and pasted something from one note to another. . . and it left out random lines (the lines i had most recently edited)

very glitchy. i hope this gets fixed soon. i use Notes a lot.

So, while MacOS 15.4 improved the response time of Notes noticeably, I can't say the same for notes in iOS 18.4. It still takes too long for a note (existent and new) to open / to appear. As almost a day after the update the hint about about the update still being completed in the background is still shown, I'm still hoping that the issue will be fixed. Six months after the release of iOS 18. Any updates from the other posters?

I have exactly the same issue. I used collapsible headings in a longer note - albeit a lot of collapsible headings - and now it is terribly slow to scroll or otherwise navigate.