IOS 16 made Spotlight nearly unusable on many iPhones.
Spotlight, once an essential tool in your iPhone's productivity arsenal, has become nearly unusable in iOS 16. Sometimes it brings up search results almost instantly, but most of the time it takes a few seconds (or more) to find things. Latency is especially noticeable on older iPhones, and it's pretty sad to see the inconsistency of a once reliable tool.
The same feature faced similar problems on Mac, but at least there are alternatives, like Alfred and Raycast, that make up for it. On your iPhone, you can't replace Spotlight with an alternative, but you can try a couple of solutions.
Use your iPhone's app library
If you keep swiping left on your iPhone home screen, you'll find the App Library at the bottom. Once there, scroll down to open the search bar and type the name of the app you want to find. You will see that this search box instantly loads the results you are looking for. We tested it on a three-year-old iPhone XS Max with about 200 apps installed. Results loaded without delays or long waits, every time. It's just a matter of switching your muscle memory from Spotlight to App Library Search. It takes more strokes, but overall the job gets done faster. And if you hide or remove all but one of your home screen pages, your app library can be at your fingertips.
For other types of searches, it's best to open individual apps and use the search box within. For example, instead of using Spotlight to find your contacts, you can open the Contacts or Phone apps and search there.
Minimize what Spotlight can show you
You can disable some of the possible results that slow down Spotlight. This solution is less than ideal because it reduces the functionality of Spotlight, but if you really can't use workarounds, it's worth a try. Be careful though, this is a bit bulky. First, you can go to Settings & Siri &; Search on your iPhone and disable the following options:
- Show tips
- Show recent
- Show in search
- Show in Spotlight
This will reduce the things Spotlight tries to load and may improve performance. If that doesn't work, the next step is a more boring option. On the same settings page, scroll down and tap on any app name. Disable Show content in search to prevent Spotlight from indexing content within the app. You can manually repeat this process for any apps you don't want Spotlight to scan. It goes without saying that you might not want to do this for apps like Contacts, where you often want to see detailed information. But once you're done, your delayed Spotlight should be much faster.