Apple Notes keeps crashing in iOS11

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Robert,

I had the same issues; even changing out my phone. I tried all remedies. I found a solution that I would like you to try. Please do, then let me know if it fixes your issues. After this solution, my notes app has not locked up since. The issues is conflicting iCloud data.

1. Open general, iCloud, and sign out of iCloud. Do not save a copy on your phone as it is already saved in the cloud. Wait until the device completely signs out.

2. Power cycle that device.

3. Do the same to each Apple device you have: iPad, MacBook, etc.

4. After all devices are signed out of iCloud; sign back in to one device (phone)

5. Open notes application and wait until all your notes restore. This could take hours.

6. After all notes are restored in first device; proceed to the second device and do the same. (Only do one at a time)

7. You will need to open apps like “pages” “reminders” and “iBooks” to let your data come back to your devices.

That is it. Once I did this, my notes app has been working perfectly. Please let me know after you try this.

Blessings,

Scott

Notes has some kind of conflict with Apple mail. My notes just locked up again, and for the 3rd straight time quitting the mail app released the hang up of notes after about 5 seconds. Next time it locks try this.

I’m curious to know something from all of you. I have an iPad and notes never locks up. I have a Macbook pro and notes never locks up. This seems to be a device problem. I just hung up with Apple, and they told me to reset all my settings on my phone and so far it’s working. Don’t do anything yet because this forces you to set up your iPhone for fingerprint, WiFi, Apple Pay etc from scratch. Big pain, but so far worth it. I will report back tomorrow to let everyone know if it solved the problem.

Notes has not locked in a few days now. This is the longest it has ever gone. I don’t know if anyone exported Evernote notes into the notes app, but I did. I deleted all Evernote notes that had links to Evernote notes. Problem solved. No hanging or lockups.

What’s worked for me is to close out the mail app while using notes — a pain, because I use the two together frequently. I am a heavy user and use the notes app on my iPad Pro and iPhone X, as well as on my iMac in my business daily. Interestingly, I never, ever have a problem on any other device.

This is a temporary work around. Hopefully at some point Apple will wake up and do something to address this issue as it seems fairly widespread. For now, the work around does work, though, as the freezing issue doesn’t come up as long as the mail app is closed.

That WOULD be nice to get for Christmas 😉

I thought the problems had been resolved in the latest update but...a couple of days ago I started a last minute gift list to which I added a few web links. It KILLED Notes on iOS. I wanted to copy some of the info I’d gathered and was completely unable to access the app: hanging, crashing the whole bit. I finally managed to delete that particular note after 15mn of cursing and force quitting—boom, problems gone.

Clearly there are very serious problems that seem to be related to syncing and/or network activity. The net result is that I will now avoid saving any links into the app. I’ve relaunched my copy of Bear. This is pretty shameful IMHO.

Hi, I'm having the same problems as everyone else — notes crashes on iPhone X and iPad 10.5. Running 11.2.2 release on both. I have a lot of notes ~2500.

I think I have a work around, though it isn't great. My diagnosis is that it is a memory issue. I think Notes is not well coded to deal with low memory situations. When Notes gets flakey, a simple force-quit of notes and re-launch often does not get it to work smoothly again. However, I can get it to work with either a) reboot or b) force quit a bunch of high memory apps (Mail, News, Safari, etc). It's very strange to me that force-quitting other apps gets Notes to work again — that is what leads me to think that this is a low memory issue. Can others try and see if force-quitting other apps helps them? I hope that apple fixes this soon!

Notes is still problematic on 11.2.5 for me as well. In another thread - maybe in the developer forums - someone tried moving all notes from the iCloud account to a local account on mac, deleting the iCloud notes, and then moving all of them back. I haven't had the time to try this yet. I think that the problem is more fundamental - Notes doesn't handle low memory situations well, and if you have a lot of notes, the need for memory increases and the problem gets worse.

I had the same issue, and I could solve it!

I have about 500 Notes in quite a lot of Folders an Sub-Folders, initially I thought this might be the problem.

The problem occured on my iPhone and my iPad after upgrading to iOS 11.

I never had problems with Notes on my MacBook and iMac.

What I tried, and it didn’t help:

I happened to upgrade to an iPhone X, and then decided to set it up as a new phone - I wanted to be cautious, the main reason beeing these problems with Apple Notes. But the Problem occured also on the iPhone X...

All Updates to iOS 11 (I’m on 11.2.5) failed to solve the problem.

I switched iCloud for Notes of, deleted all Notes from the devices - on both simultaneously, restarted them, opened the clean Notes App, switched iCloud for Notes back on - Problem back.

I also restored my iPad Pro as new - did not help.

What solved the problem - and I never thought it would, because I meanwhile got an new Phone, restored my iPad...:

1st: delete the Notes app, confirm that the contents will be deleted but stay on iCloud.

2nd: turn the device off, switch it back on

3rd: reinstall Notes from the App Store

4th: switch iCloud for Notes back on in Settings (it gets deactivated by deleting the app in the first place)

5th: start the clean Notes App, everything gets downloaded from iCloud.

NOTES APP RUNS SMOOTH!!!!!!

(Fingers crossed, knocking on wood...)

Dear Apple:

I love your products, Apps and services. I can see you hab a hard time lately.

But this problem is widely spread, and as I can see in my family: it’s not connected to having a lot of notes either...

How can it be possible that you didn’t come up with a solution?

And if there is no solution: why didn't you come up with a work around like this one? At least somewhere here in the Forum, that we can find it when googling our problem...

This is VERY disappointing.

Next up:

Spelling correction on iOS completely NUTS. Random capitalization, weird auto correct for very common words...

PLEASE!

Thanks for the post, dejan171, but my prediction is that as long as you are using the iOS Notes (on your iPhone or iPad), you'll be back posting here that your solution didn't work. I predict what you've done is only a temporary fix. There are several such fixes people have tried and posted about but, so far from what I've observed, all their experiences are the same as mine; it is not permanent. This is an iOS problem, and while things you do provide a temporary fix, there will be no permanent fix until, at least, iOS 11.3 is issued (beta users have reported that it fixes the Notes problem). Let me give you an example. At one point, I thought the problem was that there were sync conflicts between my Notes in iOS on my iPhone and either Notes in iCloud (on the web) or Notes MacOS (on my Mac). So I painstakingly compared all my Notes in all three sources and, indeed, I found that there were three or so notes in Notes iOS that were not in iCloud Notes or MacOS Notes (by the way, I found that iCloud Notes and MacOS Notes were always consistent with each other; it was iOS Notes that was always the problem). I next copied the iOS note. I then changed the title of the iOS note, adding "OLD" to the title so I could differentiate it. Next, I pasted the note into MacOS Notes. The note immediately synced through iCloud Notes and it appeared in iOS Notes. I then deleted the old version of that note in IOS Notes. I did this with the few notes that appeared in iOS Notes but not in the other two sources. I then turned off iCloud for Notes on my iPhone and deleted all of them. Once they were all deleted, I went back into iPhone settings and turned iCloud Notes back on. All the notes from iCloud Notes populated into my iPhone and everything worked flawlessly for a few days. Sure enough, the problem of iOS Notes freezing and slowing down reappeared in iOS Notes. Another example: the same thing happened a few days ago with the recent iOS 11.2.6 update. After the update, again my iOS Notes worked flawlessly for about 24 hours. Then, the iOS Notes freezing and slowing down reappeared again. It's the same story. My firm conclusion from heavy use of the Notes app is that this is solely and completely an iOS Notes issue. There is no problem with iCloud Notes or MacOS Notes. Without exception, the latter two have always consistently worked. The problem has always been with iOS Notes. dejan171, I hope I am wrong, but I predict you'll be back reporting the problem has reappeared.

Public Release 11.3 is about 2 weeks away. 11.3 Beta 5 was available yesterday. Notes has been fixed in the Beta version for those still struggling. Again, make the effort and sign up for Beta incremental IOS releases. https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/how-to-enroll-in-th e-ios-beta-program/amp/

I think it may be network related, at least my problem with hangs. I was on a weak wifi connection and having lots of long pauses. I turned off the wifi and the problem disappeared. As mentioned, I have lots of accounts and a large number of notes on iCloud.

To me the problem has to be memory related. Every time Notes hangs or locks up I can release the problem by closing Apple Mail. It works every single time!!

My notes continue to work flawlessly after I removed all broken Evernote links, and all blank notes from the Evernote export into notes.