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.

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

iPhone 15 ProMax

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.

I am having the same problem. Notes is unusable under iOS 18. It just freezes solid, and if I flip my phone into landscape and back to portrait positions it crashes.

iPhone 14 pro

I believe that I have found a solution: turn off Notes syncing in iCloud settings. This will remove all your notes from your device. Then turn notes syncing back on. Go to notes, which will be empty, and then watch as all your notes come back. It seems to fix whatever was broken.

So, go to Settings, select your name at the top of the list, select iCloud in the second grouping on that page, then select Notes in the Saved to iCloud grouping, then turn off Sync this iPhone (or iPad), and then turn it back on. That’s it.

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 problem App freezes on large notes mainly on iPhone BUT I also noted on Mac when typing characters jump all over the place and lines g out and down. VERY disappointed as have grown to depend for work files and did NOT expect this from APPLE.

IS there ANYONE from Apple looking at these numerous complaints and actioning?? Its been several months since the IOS18 trial version was out and 1 months since the official upgrade and the issue should have been FIXED - UNACCEPTABLE and in fact commercially SHAMEFUL - Not the Apple we know

What are you doing about it?

Does anyone know at the closest substitute to Notes?

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.

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 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 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 🤭

Same is super challenging

I had the same problem tonight when I decided to open the Notes app. There was a padlock icon on everything notes that I had, and it made it impossible to edit or write anything. I solved it by clicking on the unlock/lock that shows up on the menu at the upper right hamburger bar.

iPhone 14 pro updated to ios18