Hello developers,
First of all, thank you for creating such a great tool.
I have been using the official Obsidian sync feature for almost a year now, but one issue has been consistently troubling me: Obsidian on my iPhone constantly reloads during synchronization. As shown in the video below, the reloading process can sometimes take over an hour to complete, making it nearly impossible for me to use Obsidian on my iPhone.
After some trial and error, I discovered that disabling “Installed community plugins” in Sync settings greatly alleviates the issue, though it doesn’t completely resolve it, and it still significantly affects my workflow.
This problem has persisted from my iPhone 12 mini to my current iPhone 15, across iOS versions from 16 to 17, and throughout multiple Obsidian updates.
Interestingly, I don’t encounter this issue on my iPad Pro M1 (1TB), which leads me to believe that it might be related to memory usage, as my iPad has 16GB of RAM and handles Obsidian without any issues. In contrast, the iPhone with its lower memory might be forcing Obsidian to reload the process frequently.
In hindsight, I regret not getting the iPhone 15 Pro with 8GB of RAM, as this might have prevented the issue.
With the iPhone 16 announcement just days away, I’m torn. I’m otherwise satisfied with my iPhone 15 in terms of design and performance, and Obsidian is the only app that’s giving me trouble. I’m reluctant to spend more money upgrading to the iPhone 16, especially when I’m not even sure if the 8GB RAM will fully resolve the issue. I might end up in the same situation after upgrading.
I suspect that the high memory usage could be due to the number of plugins I’ve enabled. I currently have 210 community plugins installed, with 75 of them active:
[
"recent-files-obsidian",
"shortcuts-extender",
"smart-random-note",
"obsidian-sortable",
"obsidian-style-settings",
"Enhanced-editing",
"darlal-switcher-plus",
"obsidian-activity-history",
"persistent-links",
"settings-search",
"obsidian42-strange-new-worlds",
"obsidian-spaced-repetition",
"quickadd",
"inline-math",
"math-booster",
"rendered-block-link-suggestions",
"quick-preview",
"quick-latex",
"obsidian-advanced-new-file",
"obsidian-advanced-uri",
"obsidian-auto-link-title",
"auto-displaystyle-inline-math",
"better-fn",
"math-in-callout",
"better-word-count",
"callout-manager",
"obsidian-charts",
"oz-clear-unused-images",
"clever-search",
"colored-text",
"obsidian-commits",
"open-note-to-window-title",
"dataview",
"dynamic-line-height-cjk",
"excalibrain",
"obsidian-excalidraw-plugin",
"obsidian-latex",
"file-explorer-note-count",
"float-search",
"obsidian-hider",
"obsidian-hide-sidebars-when-narrow",
"obsidian-image-toolkit",
"obsidian-kanban",
"obsidian-link-converter",
"obsidian-linter",
"obsidian-list-callouts",
"obsidian-local-images",
"obsidian-markdown-furigana",
"marp",
"mathlive",
"obsidian-minimal-settings",
"nldates-obsidian",
"omnisearch",
"obsidian-outliner",
"pane-relief",
"obsidian-paste-to-current-indentation",
"url-into-selection",
"pdf-plus",
"workspaces-plus",
"cm-chs-patch",
"obsidian-tracker",
"obsidian-memos",
"templater-obsidian",
"tag-wrangler",
"tag-summary-plugin",
"obsidian42-brat",
"obsidian-markdown-export-plugin",
"folder-note-core",
"alx-folder-note-folderv",
"alx-folder-note",
"obsidian-tasks-plugin",
"obsidian-icon-shortcodes",
"surfing",
"obsidian-textgenerator-plugin",
"obsidian-paste-png-to-jpeg"
]
That being said, I really don’t want to disable any of these plugins just for iOS, as I value consistency across my devices.
Therefore, I kindly ask the Obsidian development team to consider optimizing the app’s memory usage on iOS. I would greatly appreciate any improvements in this regard. Thank you!
If optimizing memory usage is difficult, could you please inform users about the general relationship between Obsidian’s memory consumption and the number of enabled community plugins? Additionally, could you provide guidance on how many plugins are recommended for devices with different RAM capacities, such as 4GB, 6GB, 8GB, and even the upcoming 12GB iPhone models (see X 上的 郭明錤 (Ming-Chi Kuo)：“Among the 2025 new iPhone models, only the iPhone 17 Pro Max will feature the following specifications: 1. 12GB DRAM (while the ultra-thin iPhone, iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and SE4 will all have 8GB). Enhanced on-device AI capabilities will likely be a major selling point for” / X)?