Spotlight Search Not Working on iOS 12.1

steps from the link above... this worked for me:

1. Go to Settings: General: Language
2. Change your Language to English (UK)
3. Force close the Settings app
4. Go to Settings: General: Language again
5. Change your Language back to English (US). Enjoy your Settings Search fully functional again! 🙂

After erasing everything, setting the phone up as new and then erasing again and restoring it is now working again. Seems like a pain, I wish there was a way to just rebuild the phone’s search database.

I am using a iPhone xs max 256GB and I recently encountered the same problem: spotlight search returns empty result after my phone runs for 2-8 hours. I have tried all suggestions and none seems to cure the problem, so I've decided to dig a little deeper. I don't have a solution yet but wanna share my findings here.

1. I have a huge iCloud photo library (83000+ items) and have 500+ installed apps. I thought disabling siri suggestion for photo would fix it. It didn't. I then disabled ALL apps from using siri suggestion. It didn't fix the problem either.
2. I hooking up my iPhone with mac running Xcode and looked at the console log to see why spotlight search dint' return anything. I found out that the "searchd" process is kicked off every time i type in spotlight search text box, but the "searchd" process was crashing (exited) due to low memory. It then respawn itself but got killed again, and again. Rebooting the iPhone would revive spotlight search for a while but eventually "searchd" will get into the state of not having enough memory to start.

My theory is that: "searchd" is using sqlite as db (I think) and my accumulated spotlight search index has became too big to be used. I can't find any way to remove the spotlight index on iOS so I am stuck. I tried reinstalling 12.1.4 hoping the installation process would clean the spotlight index and make it anew. It didn't.

Right now my options are: 1) wait for 12.2 to come out and hope either this bug is fix or 2) erase my iPhone and reinstall (not restore) all apps from scratch. It is painful and time consuming so I ain't doing it at the moment.

I am hoping Apple is reading this forum and give some suggestions.

I might have found a work around to the Spotlight search not working problem. However, I haven't nailed down the the exact cause yet. Here are the steps I took to get my Spotlight search working again (at least partially).

My thinking about this problem is that "searchd" process is running out of memory (see my last post) so I think disabling everything spotlight related might cut down the memory consumption. The first thing I did was to remove apps i don't really need. I started with about 600+ apps install and now down to 500.

1. Disabled keyboard "Predictive" and "Checking Spelling". under Settings -> General -> Keyboard.
2. Removed all the dictionaries under Settings -> General -> Dictionary
3. This step is tedious considering I had hundreds of app. Under Settings -> Siri & Search, for each app listed, turn off "Siri & Suggestions".
4. Reboot.

I was able to now do Spotlight search and launch apps by typing. I let the phone run for couple of days to make sure that this solution holds up, and it did. Then i re-enable apps one-by-one that I must use Spotlight search: Notes, Contact, Mail, etc. Remember to just enable few app to try out of the spotlight still runs after a day or two. If spotlight stops working, then you can nail down to which app spotlight has problem indexing.

So far, I have re-enabled spotlight for all Apple apps except Photos and spotlight is still working. I have 80,000+ photos in my iCloud library and i don't need to search for photo often so I just leave it at that. I worry that a large photo library would create an index too big for Spotlight to run in memory. Other largish apps including Evernote (6000+ notes) are suspicious too so I haven't reenabled spotlight for them.

This has NEVER worked for me since I upgraded my iPhone X to the XS Max, with all versions of iOS 12 (12, 12.1 and 12.2). It worked fine with the SAME iCloud backup/restore on my previous phone.

I have posted this bug on both the general Apple bug reporter as well as my Apple Beta account.

Like others, my spotlight search and mail search are completely broken, but I can dictate "Hey Siri, open AppName" with no problem. Some of the workarounds described in this thread (and others) will sometimes work for one or two attempts but eventually it returns to having no results show up.

My system:

• • XS Max 256 GB model (with about 200 GB free)
  • One MDM profile installed (MaaS360) for my work (which is required for me to keep installed)
  • 5 email accounts (work, iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, and Cox)
  • 30K+ photos (5 GB); 700 videos
  • 329 apps

What I have done so far that has NOT worked:

1. 1. Did the language swap (US to UK and back)...this sometimes fixes it for one or two sessions and then breaks again.
   2. Soft resets
   3. Removed all shortcuts stored on the home screen
   4. Full factory reset and restore from iCloud backup
   5. Disabled Siri from most of the apps
   6. Disabled both search options under Mail's preferences

At last, Thanks @jakerussel1 - This solved the problem! And so simply and easily!

looks like many old apps appeared “off”:

just manually click each one and turned on “show app”.

Must be some bug in background compatibility of the OS upgrade.

I have this problem too, but with an iPhone XS Max. I’ve tried reinstalling the iOS, restoring from an old backup. I’m now in the process of setting it up as a new phone to see if that works. I really can’t believe Apple would do this to us.

Unfortunately the fix was short lived. I am now back to the same state I was in before with no search results. I have since tried to turn everything off, location, background update etc with no luck. I also downloaded apps to see if the CPU and Ram were maxed out and that’s not the case they were only 17% utilized at the most.

So I bounce this back to apple, where do we go from here??? This is ridiculous that we have the “most powerful iPhone” and it can’t even handle a simple search.

Not me, I have 12.1.2 and this nonsense has been happening since 12.0. How is this not fixed OS wide yet? No one at tech support knows how to fix it and I don't have the time to go through doing a Factory Data Reset / backup / restore / etc.

I have just updated to 12.1.2 and performed the language change with no results. I am not getting proper search results using search anywhere.

I received this iPhone 8 last week and set it up as new.

I’m on an iPhone XS with 12.1.2 and search isn’t working for me either. I’ve tried the simple fixes (changing languages) turning spotlight suggestions on and off and hard restarting phone. Spotlight still doesn’t work. However if I use Siri and talk to my phone to open an app it does it with no problem.

I'm also having this problem on my new iPhone XS Max. The search function in Calendar only brings up events from 2018 and 2019 when the events I'm searching for go back to 1997. A calendar is useless without the ability to search it for events. Searching in Spotlight produces only the the 2018 and 2019 events as well. What is going on?!

Lownote

Houston, TX

I have the same problem on an iPhone 6s. I’ve tried all of the suggestions so far, except for setting up the whole iPhone again, to no avail.

ive tried hard reset, settings reset, language change, Turnung Siri on and off.

I have 128 gb and setting up from a backup takes so much time to download everything that I’d rather not - any other suggestions?

Getting a host of new issues since the update. Battery drains FAST. Battery charges SLOW. Apps freeze and phone locks up into a black screen with a circle hourglass for 5 minutes and then reboots. This is a disaster. Reported multiple times but no fix yet.

Hi Jeff, did you get this fixed? My problem started much more recently than yours although upgrade to 12.1.2 over the air was done when Apple released it. Interestingly, I connected my phone to iTunes and it said that there was an update available 12.1.2 !! I did a reset all settings and the problem came back very soon (i.e. less than an hour) and the I did a reset all settings again but have not turned on Face ID and Passcode - it has been nearly 24 hours and the problem has not come back. When the problem first happened, a restart would fix it but as soon as the phone locked the the problem would be there on unlocking. The problem can't be Face ID as various models have been reported....

i have sent in a bug report.