iOS 9 Spotlight Search not working properly

Hi all,

My spotlight search was not working for me on iPad 3 after updating to iOS 9.32.

I swiped to the right as per normal but the search feature would not appear.

Reset the iPad; turned off everything in spotlight and in contacts and then re-enabled but they all failed.

Googled for answers and did not find any solutions. Finally gave up and chose to live with it.

Just as always after giving up, the solution appeared itself.

Stumbled across the solution watching my daughter making the spotlight search screen appear.

From there I knew it must work but she didn't know how she did it.

The feature has been changed on the iPad anyways as on my iPhone it still works by swiping to the right on the home screen.

Thru my iPad I have to swipe down on the home screen to enable the spotlight search feature.

Hope this helps anyone who is having trouble with enabling the spotlight feature on iOS 9+

🙂

This issue has been driving me up the wall for a while. I've just found that clearing the ram fixes the issue (hold power, then hold home button when the lock screen appears). I've no doubt the issue will return, it always does.

Force-quitting background apps also frees up RAM. Sometime faster; by nowI know which apps free up the most memory when force quit. I have no idea if iOS 10 fixes the bug.

This helped me!!!!! SO happy. SO glad. SO thankful. Thank you!

Good summary Jake. Weirdly Apple selected another response as the "recommended answer" -- must be some algorithm of theirs. It was about a measure that helps transiently. Force-quitting is what I do.

Excellent. just enabled contacts, app store and mail. This has not worked for years!

Toggling ALL the apps to "on" in the spotlight search selections worked for me. I'm not sure why, but it must be an all-or-nothing proposition. Thanks!

This worked for me as well. Unfortunately, like every other solution, it seems to work for only a small period of time. At least I can still launch apps via Siri.

I Spoke too soon. Same here it stopped working again....

The only known fix for the most common spotlight issue is to buy a 2GB RAM iPhone. Everything else is transient.

Quitting background apps will restore functionality for a time. In my case just quitting Reeder.app will often suffice.

The solution to check all apps under spotlight search fixed it for me.

At one point I thought I'd trim down the list of apps that show in Spotlight Search. As I did this, it got worse and worse. Eventually I had no apps selected in Spotlight settings and when searching for an App it returning either nothing or was painfully slow. I have about 500 apps installed which may be a factor. I definitely didn't expect the software to behave this way (less should be better, right??)

Actually, the symptoms I had may not be what the original poster had, but perhaps the solution is the same

For most people enabling "all spotlight search" is only a temporary fix -- similar to rebooting the phone, changing language, etc.

I've worked every easy fix ever proposed. Based on the advice of a colleague who has an experience similar to mine I gave up and did the backup/wipe phone/restore cycle. Spotlight has been working for 3 days. I think that may be a record. If it makes it to 7 days I'll consider that a significant change. Still too early to say.

I am keeping "all spotlight search" though. My guess is that changing settings there doesn't alter what's indexed, it just causes items to be filtered out from display. So any exceptions can only slow things down...

iPhone 7, iOS 10 and still the same problem after an iCloud restoration.

This is really unacceptable!

Has anyone found a solution?

I just got my iPhone 7Plus and can't search my messages. I checked my wife's 7Plus and she has the same problem. My daughters iPhone 7 is just fine. This is really bizarre. I spoke to Apple, and they were of no help. I tried all the recommendations listed, turning iCloud off and then on, toggling iMessage, turning the search for messages in Spotlight off and then on, changing the language, restoring the phone and none of it fixes the issue.

I am extremely upset, and Apple behaves as if this is a problem they never heard of.

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you.