Notes app is crashing after iOS 18 update on my iPhone

This update is horrendus for notes, it was working fine before the update to ios18. I’m a huge user of notes and have thousands on icloud. It’s unsuable now, notes freezes, glitches, lags and I can’t access important documents. This is infuriating. I’ve unsynced and trying to re-sync my notes to see if that does anything, and the process is taking forever to re-sync.

Such a nasty update for notes.

I’m having the same issues, especially with larger notes. With smaller notes it lets me open them, but after I open one note and then try to open another one it just freezes and won’t even register me touching the screen. I have a 14 plus, updated this morning.

Update: I rebooted my phone, but it was ineffective I haven't checked all the notes, but the one I use every morning as a journal, which is very large, freezes the app immediately. I left it like that for some minutes to see if the app would come back to life, but it didn't. My phone, however, became quite warm.

Yes. Extremely laggy and nearly unusable. App freezes, text entries lag, very unstable.

iPhone 15 ProMax

I had the same problem on my iPhone 11 Pro Max since yesterday when I updated to IOS 18 and the notes app appeared to be unresponsive and none of my notes would open. I had one large notes file which I desperately needed.

I tried all the solutions online and non worked. This included locking the note and applying a password. No good.

Some people suggested turning off syncing to iCloud but I never was using iCloud. I tried enabling and then disabling but that didn’t work. I tried logging out of iCloud then restarting the phone and logging back in to no avail.

I realised that even though the notes app appeared to be frozen some functionality was still working in that I was able to move the notes file to and from iCloud and between folders locally on the iPhone.

I realised that I could create a brand new test note file and this worked perfectly and would open and close and could be edited perfectly normally as long I kept away from my existing file. Having created a new file I disabled iCloud syncing and turned off 4G mobile data and clicked on my existing note and just left the app open apparently hung but after about twenty minutes it finally opened complete with all my data much to my relief.

I immediately copied all the text into an email that I sent to myself as a backup.

Problem Solved.

Notes now works fine as it did before the update. Just to be sure as I am an IT engineer I decided to delete my notes from both iPhone and iCloud and removed and reinstalled the notes app from the App Store to have a clean start recreating a new note from the data I copied out of the old file.

Everything now back to normal with no data loss but I really don’t like the new layout of IOS 18 and it’s caused a major headache with notes.

Hope that helps.

Good luck.

Same here. It’s completely unusable. Sucks because I rely on the app. It freezes up. No amount of touching works. I have to force quit the app but that really doesn’t do anything.

crawfords wrote: "...IS there ANYONE from Apple looking at these numerous complaints and actioning??..."

crawfords ~ Unlikely, as these are user-to-user communities. Use this form:

Feedback - Notes - Apple

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I had the same problem when I updated to iOS 18.1.1 yesterday: my large notes froze, I couldn’t open them, the small ones still worked. I was too afraid to stop syncing to iCloud and delete all notes, But what worked for me was:

• go into air plane mode (WiFi off)
• open large note and just wait
• my note opened after 1 minute or less.

now I’m back in online mode and it still works.

Iphone 16 Pro here. The frustrating problem with Apple’s Notes app has not changed at all with iOS 18.1.

Apple- Please fix this! It has been going on for about six weeks now!

I am having this problem on my iPad (M4 Pro). I’ve tried restarting the app and rebooting my device and it’s still frozen and stuck on the last note I used. However, the notes app on my iPhone (13 Pro) is working fine.

I just wanted to update my situation. It seems to have fixed itself over night. I’m thinking the app needed to re sync with iCloud maybe. Whatever happened it’s working fine now. Hopefully I just didn’t jinx myself 🤭

Notes app is not working after 18.0.1 update.

I usually use the Notes App to learn French on my iPhone 12 Pro.

After getting my iPhone 16 today, when I read the articles which I copied to the Notes app, it could not operated properly. I used the function "look up" for definition a lot, and it should not be a big deal. But now the Notes app on my iPhone 16, which runs iOS 18, crashes out every two times I "look up" the vocabularies.

Wish the next update will fix this problem.

I just notices how Note has degenerated on iOS 18. If I have my iPad connected to the Internet, Notes will not write tp the cloud - then write to the screen. That is like 1980s telnet. If I turn off Internet, then it is OK.

NOTE for EVERYONE. APPLE Does not pay attention to these forums. If you have a problem, call Apple Support, get a ticket, reference this list.

Otherwise the issues are never logged, never get to the product managers, never get to customer support.

I’ll get my ticket in this afternoon and share (sharing each other tickets is one way to building community support to get Apple to fix problems.).

It is really annoying and even waited until 18.1 update but not even that helped, İ guess İ dont use Notes anymore and will look for a more reliable app, incredible that apple is not doing something about it