Has anyone else noticed Obsidian on mobile loads faster after last week's update? (at least on iOS)

When I first used Obsidian on my iPhone, my big pet peeve for it was the long startup time, like 3-7 seconds, which is way too long to quickly write down notes I’ve needed to a few times. That and the frequent crashes made me look for alternative markdown apps, I’ve settled down on Taio.

Those two things are also what made me regret spending so much time writing mobile CSS. I didn’t actually use the mobile app at all and didn’t want to until I spent many hours perfecting my mobile layout and CSS for it … only to then consistently crash when it didn’t crash at all when I developed and tested the CSS, wow!

I felt bad doing that, but thought to myself that all of the CSS wouldn’t be for nothing, I’d just wait for the day when Obsidian’s mobile app would be optimized enough to load fast. I thought it’d be months, or even 1-2 years before then, but it seems like it came with last week’s update. It still doesn’t load, but its consistently 50% and or significantly less time than i previously was, and it hasn’t crashed at all! I looked at the changelog for the update and it doesn’t mention the mobile app running faster or being optimized.

Has anyone else noticed this?

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Loading time hasn’t changed for me (~ 5 seconds). But I’m glad you’re seeing an improvement!

@Oneechan69 Glad to hear you are having this experience! I have also noticed a quicker Obsidian load time on iOS. For reference, my mobile vault is over 100,000 notes and Obsidian loads in about 3 seconds.

Currently on mobile, I keep fewer (if any) plugins enabled at most times, temporarily enabling them as needed. I also keep only a very small portion of my media loaded on mobile and synced from desktop. I initially took these steps a while back only partially because of load time, but I am beginning to rethink this. On mobile, having all media and plugins automatically loaded is definitely not necessary, but it surely would be a nice luxury. Hopefully after some testing, I will be able to get my entire vault with all plugins loaded on mobile without taking too much of a performance hit.

Thanks for drawing my attention to this! Again, I definitely noticed this right away. But it is the kind of thing that’s very easy to get used to. I’d be interested in hearing if others are having this experience as well. Good luck!

I also made a Reddit post for this at the same time: Reddit - Dive into anything, which has ~45 upvotes, so I guess a bunch of other users noticed it as well.

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Hi I-d-as,

I sync Obsidian with syncthing between my Android phone and my laptop. How do you manage that not all plugins are enabled on your phone, while they are enabled on your laptop?

Thanks,
Silias

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@SiliasOS On mobile, in the settings under “Vault Configuration Sync” there is a toggle for “Active Community Plugin List” that should be turned off. With that off, you can simply enable and disable which plugins you want to use by going into “Settings> Community plugins”. I believe you will have to do this for each device you may be using including desktop.

I hope this helps.

Edit: Not sure what to do if you are syncing with a different service but perhaps just disable the plugins. Sorry.

I didn’t find that setting… Where do I have to look that up?

Sorry, when I was first answering I hadn’t realized that you weren’t using Obsidian Sync. Those settings would be accessed by clicking on the Sync item. I am not sure how to do it without using Obsidian Sync. I suggested that you maybe try just disabling the plugins you don’t want to use on Mobile, but I am not entirely sure how that would affect the configuration files which Syncthing would likely be syncing to your other devices. Definitely make a backup before experimenting, as it might be possible to lose settings.

Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.

As l-d-as mentioned, those selective sync options are only available with Obsidian Sync (as far as I know).

One option you could try is using a separate config folder for mobile. In Settings > About at the bottom you can override the config folder per device. I did this when I used iCloud to sync. I had:

.obsidian ← two desktops
.obsidian.phone ← phone
.obsidian.ipad ← iPad

The settings and plugins I use on the desktop vs ipad vs phone are very different, so it was fine for me to have different config folders. Other than snippets not syncing automatically, this worked fine.

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