#12

I have this problem on a 2018 11" iPad Pro using iCloud syncing. Sometimes the app will work fine, other times itā€™ll finish loading the workspace (which itself is lengthy) be responsive for 20-30 seconds and the stop accepting any user input. This happens regardless of keyboard being used.

The slow workspace loading is also a problem on my iPhone 12 Pro. The iCloud folder has fully synced but it still takes a while to load the workspace and will occasionally freeze or crash.

My vault is around 2GB and contains a lot of non-md files as Iā€™m trying to use Obsidian as my general reference system

Edit:
iPhone is using iOS 14.7.1
iPad is using iPadOS 15 public beta

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#14

Is it a beta problem, or can you reproduce it on iPad OS 14.7?

Donā€™t get me wrong, it is always good to find bugs during beta (and solve them during beta). But you are running a beta OS. There is so much work going on on the kernel and the OS itself, thus you got to expect problems.

#15

I had both problems on iOS 14.7 and have it in the latest iOS 15 beta.

a) freeze on launch ā€“ which I can mitigate by using ā€œFilesā€ app and forcing iCloud sync before launching Obsidian, this feels related to vault search indexing

b) freeze in use ā€“ which I can mitigate by detaching the Apple brand external keyboard

c) problem not mentioned above: some keystrokes will not go from external keyboard to Obsidian regardless whether itā€™s being responsive, until I detach keyboard, force quit Obsidian, attach keyboard, and relaunch Obsidian

Combination of Obsidian, vault in iCloud, and Appleā€™s external trackpad keyboard for 2020 iPad Pro. I have to detach the keyboard to get Obsidian to interact with me again, or wait seconds to minutes.

I have a decade of markdown notes in subfolder hierarchy.

vault1: 3606 items, 370MB

vault2: 3810 items, 2GB

I carved vault2 out as it had PDF and image attachments

Per a question higher up in the thread, some of the .md files have incidental inline HTML, but are not .html files called .md.

#16

Iā€™ve seen this behaviour across apps in iPadOS 15 with the smart keyboard, FWIW.

#17

Exactly! Especially with latest Beta (5?), the problem is with iPad Air. App is un-usable. Similar issues with other apps are no longer detected in those apps. I have been continually reporting issue with Apple Feedback app. Any selection of external keyboard (Logitech OR Apple Magic) Space Bar or direction/arrow keys causes the app to act erratically or freeze. Shut down and reopen is required to use app again.

#18

Ryan - it makes sense :wink: when more than one user makes very similar observations with essentially/potentially somewhat different circumstances and the same result. The Common Denominators seem to be the Obsidian mobile app in iPadOS15(Beta) ONLY with an external keyboard.

#19

@amrnt @ryanjamurphy It could be the Accessiblity ā€œfull keyboard accessā€ setting.

See my post here. When I have full keyboard access turned on, I get nothing but problems in Obsidian. With it off, everything is just fine.

This setting explains why it has everything to do with the hardware keyboard :slight_smile:

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#20

Interesting theory, but Iā€™ve had system-wide issues with an external keyboard on iPadOS 15 without that accessibility setting enabled.

#21

Chiming in - I tried 1.0.3 and 1.0.4 beta on my iPhoneXS 512GB, iOS 14.7.1 with a vault of around ~1700 files (all .md and .png). I had the freezing too, it was so bad I had to force quit the app ā€“ total lockup and unresponsive UI.

Not sure what process was happening in the background (some kind of index being built etc) but eventually it seemed to settle down. It was really frustrating at first. I submitted some feedback through TestFlight but not sure what else I can do to help debug this. Is there a logfile somewhere?

#22

When you had problems, was it after a lot of changes had taken place in your vault? Or was it a first launch of that vault?

And what sync service was this with?

#23

@ryanjamurphy this was after an initial seeding of the vault (to iCloud). So yes there was activity going on at first. I made a full copy of my ā€œrealā€ vault just to play around with the mobile app.

#24

Yeah, initial launch always seems to have issues. Same if you come back to the vault after a lot of changes have taken place. iCloud is simply stubborn about how files are handled, and Obsidian needs to see every file in the vault. That initial downloading and indexing activity is what causes the lag, but once itā€™s done, it tends to perform perfectly.

The only solution I can imagine is deliberately locking down the app while this loading activity takes place, giving the use only a progress bar, loading screen, or similar.

#25

Got it. Yes it seems to be working pretty smoothly now after a few false starts and quite a bit of waiting. A locked screen with a progress bar would definitely be a big UX improvement.

Is this experience the same when using the paid Obsidian Sync service instead of iCloud? If Sync works better that would be another big incentive to switch to it.

#26

IIRC the Sync experience is a little better on first launch, as the files are synced from within Obsidian. Sync has also generally been celebrated for being faster/more reliable, plus the other benefits it has over iCloud.

Naturally there are tradeoffs. (E.g., I use iCloud because Sync has a max vault size.)

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#27

I suspect itā€™s because the files inside the iCloud/Obsidian/{vault} havenā€™t completely downloaded from iCloud (itā€™s a new iPad) so I killed the Obsidian app and opened Files, and navigated to my vault and left it open until the cloud download icon disappeared from each file. Scrolling through the list will do that, or you can tap-hold on the file and pick Download from the context menu.

After I made sure there arenā€™t any pending downloads, I then opened Obsidian. Of course it was laggy but not as much as before. Maybe thatā€™ll help?

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#28

I have been having this same sort of issue using iCloud to sync across mobile and desktop. The iOS app would often hang or crash on initial launch, and then ā€œcatch-upā€ and work fine one or two launches later. I recently switched to syncing with git following these instructions:

This seems to have solved the issue and the first launch experience is very snappy now. So, for me at least, this was probably an issue to do with scanning and indexing the iCloud files on launch. Hopefully the added overhead of pulling and pushing using Working Copy isnā€™t too tiresome, weā€™ll see.

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#29

I have the same issues using icloud on iphone . It crashes on the launch quite frequently. Some time it works but in general, itā€™s the point of being unusable. :frowning:
I tried uninstalling, reinstalling. etc w/o much help.

#30

What iPhone are you using? If you check Files, are many of the files in your vault not downloaded?

#31

I have iphone Xs Max with 15.01 version running. I donā€™t see files not downloaded if I see from the files app in the vault directory.

#32

Interesting. My bet is that itā€™s not downloading some hidden files in your vault that are required for Obsidian to work. Thereā€™s a fix coming in 1.0.5 for that.

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