Mobile, startup: Reduce the time until the user can write

Feature requests
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34

For the Pixel 7, it’s the internal storage, yes (no SD card slot). For the Samsung, it’s on an SD card (and includes a larger subset of the full vault on my Desktop). The vaults are synced between devices using SyncThing. All devices have their own .obsidian.HOSTNAME folder, so they’re not fighting for plugin/settings changes, and of course I don’t mess with the caching mechanisms, which are out-of-tree and not synced.

On the full-fat desktop version of the vault, find . -type f | wc reports 591642 files.

I infer a count of 30082 files on the phone in particular using

(system) tsbertalan@tian:~/Dropbox/Projects$ cat count_on_phone.sh
IFS='
'
for f in `cat tocheck`; do cd "$HOME/Dropbox/Projects/$f"; find . -type f | wc | awkfield 1; done; cd ~/Dropbox/Projects/
(system) tsbertalan@tian:~/Dropbox/Projects$ bash count_on_phone.sh  | awk '{sum+=$1;} END{print sum;}'
30082

In restricted mode, I time the phone startup as:

  • 49 seconds to get to the “Loading vault…” spinner
  • “Loading plugins” for a second or so
  • “Loading workspace…” at 1:05
  • Ready to use at 1:47

With restricted mode then turned off again and the app restarted (swiped away from recents and then reopened, that is), I see

  • “Loading your vault data” until 1:24
  • “Loading plugins” for a second or so
  • “Loading workspace” at maybe 1:26
  • Ready to use at 2:28.

(I’m doing these timings on the phone, because Samsung’s ability to lock an app to its recents carousel, whatever they call that, seems to make re-launches much less frequent on the tablet.)

I don’t know if these timing differences with and without plugins enabled are significant or just noise of some kind. But even the base case is a little painful, if much more usable than they were at launch of the Android app.

@MostlyArmless and @ichmoimeyo , yeah, I’m also just using Markor’s quick-note widget option for capture instead of obsidian. And I semi-frequently edit notes in Typora or Sublime on desktop if a second-opinion or low-level control of markdown is important. The google STT tasker integration does sound appealing.

Sine launch time is generally under 2 minutes, I’m now in the habit of pre-launching obsidian when I think that, in the next 5, I might be doing some reading/browsing/link-following tasks that Markor can’t really handle well. It’s usable (much better than at launch, as I said!), but awkward.

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