Obsidian Android app reloads vault when in background for longer than 10 minutes

Help
1

Dear Obsidian Team,

I have been a long-time user of Obsidian and Obsidian Sync, and I want to bring to your attention a persistent issue that I and many others have experienced on Android devices. For as long as I can remember, whenever the Obsidian app is left in the background for more than 10-15 minutes—whether the phone screen is off or I’m using another app—the vault reloads when I re-enter the app. This reload process can be time-consuming and disrupts the flow of thoughts whenever you want to quickly write something down or simply look up something.

This behavior is not standard among modern Android applications. I have used multiple phones, including the Pixel 8, OnePlus 11, and Poco F3, and the issue persists across all of them, regardless of the amount of RAM or beastly specs. I’ve tried various OS battery optimization and background settings (such as allowing the app to run in the background, auto-launch on startup, and locking it in recents), but none have resolved the problem. Even with a fresh vault—no sync, plugins, themes, or snippets—the issue remains.

I am not alone in experiencing this on Android devices, and it seems particularly prevalent on non-Samsung phones. Here are some examples from other users encountering the same problem:

Additionally, I’ve found instances of this issue occurring on iOS devices, although it seems less common. Unfortunately, I do not own an Apple device to test it myself, but here are some examples:

This issue has been reported numerous times but often gets dismissed as an OS or device-specific problem rather than an issue with the Obsidian app itself. However, given that it occurs across various devices and configurations—especially on Android—I believe it warrants further investigation. This is a longstanding and painful issue that significantly affects the user experience.

@WhiteNoise, I kindly ask you to look into this matter. We have been dealing with this problem for a long time, and your attention to it would be greatly appreciated.

2 Likes
2

Os: Android 11
Obsidian: 167 (149)
Obsidian Sync: no
Save mode: on
Web view: Version 128.0.6613.127 (661312731

problem

Same here, Obsidian on mobile reloads very often, after a shorter period of time. On my phone, reloading happens already after under a minute, not just minutes.

Currently I’ve trimmed my notes down to 800 notes, before I had 1100 notes, but then, all interactions in-app were slightly less responsive and probably reloading would take a bit longer as well.

possible cause

Obsidian connects to multiple online services by default (no active plugins) when I check my firewall app (obsidian is allowed to access internet). Probably, (but I’m not sure) reloading is triggered by unsatisfied background connections . Often, I’m off grid, also, restricting Obsidian to use the network seems to worsen the reloading behaviour.

Example, Foss mobile applications are very silent in comparison, therefore it’s possible to develop silent mobile applications too, obviously if applications don’t need sync or loading online resources.

alternatives

In my case, I don’t link my notes to online resources, but keep all note resources (images) offline and locally stored in my vault. Still, reloading happens pretty often.
Battery management then, doesn’t help either to mitigate Obsidians frequent reloading: normal mode is better than running obsidian in the background, this might be different from phone to phone.

1 Like
3

Thank you for sharing.

This is a painful issue.

4

Hello this is not a bug, it’s feature of Android and iOS too. Mobile OSes terminate unused apps, especially memory intensives ones. After the app is killed by the OS, it needs to be reloaded the next time you open it.

The good news is that Obsidian 1.7.x should be faster to (re)start and/or should point you to what it is making it slow.

5

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.